Re: [Gcl-devel] HEAD Maxima and HEAD trad GCL

[Mike Thomas]

Hi all..

Camm wrote:

> The maxima developers have decided to require our ansi
> build, and cvs head reflects this, to my understanding.

OK, but defpackage in the HEAD CLtL1 build is missing.
.....
>(apropos "defpackage")
>
.....

The stable branch seems OK in this regard however.


Jim wrote:

> Camm is correct. There was a brief discussion on this point on the
> various mailing lists in the past few months. I didn't see a compelling
> reason to continue to fight to keep maxima compatible with the cltl1 gcl
> build. If you forsee a problem with that decision, please say so.

Sorry; I had delivery of the Maxima list turned off until yesterday and 
missed that discussion while I was away. 

I think that movement towards ANSI standardisation of the Lisp dialect 
is a good move for Maxima.  I also agree that you shouldn't have to 
struggle to support two versions of the "same" compiler. 

If we don't fix the Windows ANSI build of GCL in time for the next 
Maxima release, CLISP is still a valid option for hard core Maxima users 
on Windows.   So that everyone is clear on this, I can't get CVS HEAD 
Maxima built with any combination of HEAD or STABLE and CLtL1 or ANSI on 
Windows today.  Focusing on ANSI GCL, there seems to be a string 
handling problem with ANSI GCL:

........
;    - Compiling module "utilities"
;      - Source file e:/cvs/maxima/src/e:/cvs/maxima/src/j/opers.lisp and
;        binary file binary-gcl/opers.o not found, not loading.
Source file "e:/cvs/maxima/src/e:/cvs/maxima/src/j/opers.lisp" and 
binary file "
binary-gcl/opers.o" do not exist.
.........

There are also other issues - the fact that we need to use a workaround 
to build ANSI GCL on Windows and the fact that the resulting build is 
unstable when it comes to error handling which often leads to a bind 
stack overflow.  Having said that I was able to use it to build and run 
both Jim's Maxima source snapshot from a few months ago and the ACL2 
current source release during the week, so there is some hope for the 
future.

Cheers

Mike Thomas.

PS: I'm struggling with Netscape Communicator to reply here (I normally 
use Outlook Express) so please let me know if this email has HTML turned 
on or anything else unsociable.




James Amundson wrote:

> On Fri, 2004-01-02 at 09:57, Camm Maguire wrote:
>  
>
> > Take care,
> >
> > Mike Thomas <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> >    
> >
> > > Hi Camm.
> > >
> > > I notice that the GCL HEAD traditional CLtL1 build (on Windows at
> > > least) doesn't build HEAD Maxima:
> > >
> > >      
>
> --Jim
>
>
>