I'm looking into porting an application that was written in InterLISP on a
Xerox D machine to the MacOS.
I am aware of Digitools' MCL (Macintosh Common LISP). Unfortunately I have
little LISP programming experience (though I have C++ experience). Is
porting InterLISP to Common LISP a fairly easy thing to do (i.e.: is
either dialect the superset of the other, or are they fairly exclusive
entities?)
TIA,
Robert
Excerpts from netnews.comp.lang.lisp: 11-Feb-96 InterLISP and Common
LISP by Robert ·····@primenet.co
> I'm looking into porting an application that was written in InterLISP on a
> Xerox D machine to the MacOS.
>
> I am aware of Digitools' MCL (Macintosh Common LISP). Unfortunately I have
> little LISP programming experience (though I have C++ experience). Is
> porting InterLISP to Common LISP a fairly easy thing to do (i.e.: is
> either dialect the superset of the other, or are they fairly exclusive
> entities?)
>
I've done several ports of projects from D machines to the MacOS.
Each time we opted to rewrite everything from scratch. Once in C,
the others in MCL. The windowing systems and Lisp dialects were
just too different to warrant a direct translation.
If the project you are porting happens to not use the windowing
system at all you might try using the InterLisp to Common Lisp
translator that comes with the versions of InterLisp from Medly (?)
on up.
This assumes of course you have access to a running D-machine.
-Ray Pelletier
In article <··················@andrew.cmu.edu> Ray Pelletier <·····@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
>
>This assumes of course you have access to a running D-machine.
>
A running D-machine is not needed. Medley runs on both Unix machines under X
and straight DOS. Send mail to ············@envos.Xerox.COM for more
information on Medley.
- Bob Bane, former Medley developer
--
Internet: ····@tove.cs.umd.edu
Voice: 301-552-4860
Symbolics once had a compatibility package which ran most Interlisp
programs, not by translating them but by supporting all the underlying
functions. However, not even I (who wrote it) have a copy any more, or
would recommend reviving it.
However, rewriting your interlisp code from scratch is a little extreme.
You can get 90% of the way to compatibility if you simply remember
that all Interlisp function are (&optional ... &rest ignore)
You'll get almost all the rest of the way if you manually
tweak Interlisp's iteration constructs into common lisp's "loop"
The remaining annoyances are dealing with interlisp's infrequently-used
NLAMBDA and LAMBDA variations. The remaining major screw is
if the program uses interlisp spaghetti stack primitives, for which
there is no parallel in common lisp.
--
My home page: ftp.netcom.com//pub/dd/ddyer/home.html
or http://www.triple-i.com/~ddyer/home.html