hypertext tools in allegro

[Dave McArthur <dave%rincon@rand.org>]

Hi,

Two weeks ago I sent our a request for hypertext-like tools running
under allegro.  The following summarizes the responses I got.  Any
comments or further information would be appreciated:

   jeh@windrider.llnl.gov (Jose E. Hernandez) suggests perhaps using Garnet
 
   Bill Hefley <weh@SEI.CMU.EDU> mentioned a UI toolkit from Berkeley called
   viola

I will check these out further.  Information about Garnet can be
obtained by sending email to garnet-internal@cs.cmu.edu.  I can send
along the readme file that Bill forwarded about viola, if any one is
interested. 

By good fortune, the latest Communications of the ACM features Lisp
and includes an article by Kevin Layer and Chris Richardson (from
Franz) that discusses windowing issues.  They point out the need for
better Lisp-to-C communication to take advantage of the many tool kits
that have been built in C (e.g., Motif and Open Look).  LispView and
CLM are sited as examples of interfaces that give Lisp programmers
access to these toolkits.  There is also a brief article on LispView.
Unfortunately LispView is built on Sun's Common Lisp, not allegro.  I
think that a similar interface in allegro would not be difficult,
since allegro provides a relatively high-bandwidth communication
between Lisp and foreign functions.  Is anyone at Franz (or outside
Franz) working on this?

So far the results of my search have been a bit disappointing.  While C
programmers appear to easily share their tools and are therefore
getting great leverage in building large systems, Lisp programmers
have generally not followed suite.  I think it is to our advantage to
turn this situation around.


dave