From: Mike Rilee
Subject: DIN Kernel Lisp
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 00:00:00 +0000
Message-ID: <33160A53.15FB@hannibal.gsfc.nasa.gov>

I just looked at Henry Baker's "Critique of DIN Kernel Lisp Definition
Version 1.2": what has happened in the meantime?

It'd be interesting to have a lisp that is good for numerical 
simulation running on current (and future) massively parallel 
machines.  How about Thinking Machines's lisp? Anything for a
Cray T3D? (Or E?)  Or must `Grand Challenge' projects suffer through
Fortran and C++?

Regards.

-- 
Mike Rilee NASA/GSFC Mailstop 930.0 Greenbelt, MD 20771
······@hannibal.gsfc.nasa.gov Ph. (301)286-4743 Fx. (301)286-1777
--
Composed using Oberon. http://www-cs.inf.ethz.ch/Oberon.html

From: Bruno Haible
Subject: Re: DIN Kernel Lisp
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 1997 00:00:00 +0000
Message-ID: <5f7kbv$b7p$1@nz12.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>

Mike Rilee <······@hannibal.gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote:
> I just looked at Henry Baker's "Critique of DIN Kernel Lisp Definition
> Version 1.2": what has happened in the meantime?

DIN Kernel Lisp has much evolved since that time: An object system has
been added. It has been merged with Japan Kernel Lisp; however, I don't
know whether the spirit of Japan Kernel Lisp has been preserved in this
process. Since then, it has been proposed as ISO ISLisp (see
ftp://ftp.harlequin.co.uk/pub/kmp/iso/v19/). It's going to become an
ISO ISLisp standard sometime soon now.

> It'd be interesting to have a lisp that is good for numerical 
> simulation running on current (and future) massively parallel 
> machines.  How about Thinking Machines's lisp? Anything for a
> Cray T3D? (Or E?)  Or must `Grand Challenge' projects suffer through
> Fortran and C++?

Unfortunately, there aren't many ISLisp implementations out there.
For numerical simulations, I'd recommend CMU Common Lisp. It produces
machine code which is equal to in quality, sometimes superior, to
C/Fortran code. (See also the excellent article by Richard Fateman et al.
in Math. Comp. or SIAM J. Comput. (?) two years ago.) CMU Common Lisp
runs on Sparc, Mips, [3456]86, HP, DEC Alpha systems, so you would better
stay away from non-standard architectures.

Note that one of your collegues, Erann Gat, is already using Common Lisp
for a space-flight project.

Thinking Machines having gone out of business, I don't think *lisp is
still supported.

Best regards,
                         Bruno

Bruno Haible                                     email: <······@ilog.fr>
Software Engineer                                phone: +33-1-49083585