is there a lisp for DOS or Win 95. I am taking an artificial intelligence class and would like to get a head start for next semester.
Preferrably freeware?
Dave
David T. Leimbach wrote:
> is there a lisp for DOS or Win 95. I am taking an artificial intelligence class and would like to get a head start for next semester.
>
> Preferrably freeware?
Shouldn't this be in the FAQ? Harlequin (http://www.harlequin.com)
and Franz (http://www.franz.com/) both do freeware versions of their
commercial products. There's also XLispStat
(http://stat.umn.edu/~luke/xls/xlsinfo/xlsinfo.html)
which is a freeware subset of Common Lisp, with extensions useful
for statisticians. You can probably get a vanilla version of XLisp
too.
With Franz and Harlequin, you need to register.
> Dave
--
Le Hibou (mo bheachd fhe/in: my own opinion)
"What the ... This is Lambic! Where's my culture of amoebic
dysentery?"
-- Gary Larson
Franz <http://www.franz.com> has a freely downloadable version of their
Allegro Common Lisp (ACL) which runs under Win95/NT. It has some limitations
(see quote below), but It's pretty useful for getting to know lisp. You
probably woldn't want to use it for serious projects though, since you can't
save the image, and you can't compile files into binaries. Every time you
want to use an existing body of code, you must recompile it from source
(i.e., load it), and you can't save the image with this newly compiled code
as part of it.
However, if you write one file that loads all your others and load it every
time you start up you can get a rough (but obviously much slower) equivalent
of a saved image. Another option is to never shut down your lisp
environment, though this is putting a lot of (misplaced?) faith in the
stability of Windows NT (to say nothing of it's crash-prone plebian cousin,
Win95).
The limited heap size might also be a problem for serious work.
It does have a very nice GUI builder though - superior to most other lisp
offerings for personal computers in this regard (I'm including MCL here).
This is from the included help system:
"Allegro CL Lite for Windows is a limited, unsupported version of Allegro
CL. It is designed as an introductory version only.
The limitations are a limited heap size, no foreign function support, no
compile-file, no disassembler, and no image saving (save-image). The
documentation fully explains these capabilities."
Harlequin have a free lisp too, but it's based on their older (Windows 3.X
?) version, not their current offering, so one shouldn't judge the current
release, LispWorks for Windows, by their FreeLisp - they're completely
different animals. I'm sure someone from Harlequin will correct me if this
is incorrect.
Raf