In article <······················@imag.fr> ········@imag.imag.fr (Francis.Sergeraert) writes:
> According to several previous articles, the only companies still
>working about Common Lisp would be Franz and Harlequin. What about
>DEC? Lisp-VMS was a good (1984-)Common-Lisp a few years ago and
>Steele-s CLtLs were published at Digital Press. These facts seemed to
>show some interest of DEC around Common Lisp. Does smeone know whether
>DEC's politics has beem modified with respect to CL?
Digital hasn't been supporting Lisp much for quite some time. They stopped
developing Vax Lisp years ago (I think they started OEMing Lucid CL in its
place), and I don't think they ever developed a Lisp for the Alpha. For a
while they were sending at least two reps to X3J13 meetings, and the
original draft editor was a tech writer employed by Digital (actually, they
still called themselves DEC in those days). The tech writer was reassigned
about five years ago, and I don't think we've seen any rep from Digital in
years.
--
Barry Margolin
······@near.net
In article <··········@nic.near.net>, ······@nic.near.net (Barry Margolin) writes:
|> Digital hasn't been supporting Lisp much for quite some time. They stopped
|> developing Vax Lisp years ago (I think they started OEMing Lucid CL in its
|> place), and I don't think they ever developed a Lisp for the Alpha. For a
|> while they were sending at least two reps to X3J13 meetings, and the
|> original draft editor was a tech writer employed by Digital (actually, they
|> still called themselves DEC in those days). The tech writer was reassigned
|> about five years ago, and I don't think we've seen any rep from Digital in
|> years.
Digital still sells their CLtL1 compliant Common Lisp for the VAX, but the
VAX Lisp development group was disbanded in 1992. Final version had some
nice DECwindows tools. The OEMing of Lucid CL is valid. Lucid, Inc. ported
Lucid CL version 4.0 to the VAX. I ported a large application developed
with Lucid CL version 4.0 on Ultrix to the VAX version with no problems.
Harlequin CL on the Alpha is supposed to be a hot number. I wonder what
it would be like to use this on a worstation utilizing the just announced
1 billion instructions per second Alpha chip.
I'm wondering if there is a correlation between companies neglecting their
Lisp development efforts and their financial condition. DEC neglected their
traditional research and academic markets (historical users of Lisp) in
their pursuit of commercial markets, and they are experiencing their
current financial debacle. Lucid branched out from their traditional Lisp
market with Energize and the Lucid C++ compiler (LCC), and they are in
chapter 7. Lucid situation is less clear, though, as Energize and LCC
are excellent products.
--- AlanG