Wade Hennessey's work on lisp

[Bryan M Kramer <kramer@ai.toronto.edu>]

I picked up Hennessey's paper (described in included message below)
and found it quite convincing. I'd like to know what people at Franz
think of this work and if acl is moving in this direction.

|Bryan M. Kramer, Ph.D.	      416-978-7330, fax 416-978-1455|
|Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto      |
|6 King's College Road, Room 283E			    |
|Toronto, Ontario, Canada      M5S 1A4                      |


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Date:    28 Oct 92 18:43:01 +0000
From:    wade@leland.Stanford.EDU (Wade Hennessey)
Subject: New release of WCL (Common Lisp for SPARCs)

WCL version 2.14 is now available for anonymous FTP from
sunrise.stanford.edu.  This release fixes all bugs reported since
release 2.1.  

A WCL mailing list called wcl@sunrise.stanford.edu has also been
created to circulate information about new releases, bug reports, etc.
If you would like to be on this list, please send your name to
wcl-request@sunrise.stanford.edu.

WCL is an implementation of Common Lisp for SPARC based workstations
A  paper describing WCL was published in the proceedings of the 1992
Lisp and Functional Programming  Conference. The abstract for
the paper follows:

    Common Lisp implementations for Unix have
    traditionally provided a rich development environment at the expense
    of an inefficient delivery environment.  The goal of WCL is to allow
    hundreds of Lisp applications to be realistically available at once,
    while allowing several of them to run concurrently.  WCL accomplishes
    this by providing Common Lisp as a Unix shared library that can be
    linked with Lisp and C code to produce efficient applications.  For
    example, the executable for a Lisp version of the canonical ``Hello
    World!''  program requires only 40k bytes under SunOS 4.1 for SPARC.
    WCL also supports a full development environment, including dynamic
    file loading and debugging.  A modified version of GDB
    the GNU Debugger, is used to debug WCL programs, providing support for
    mixed language debugging. 

WCL is not a 100% complete Common Lisp, and some of the more obscure
functions are not fully implemented.  However, WCL does provide CLX R5
as a shared library, and comes with PCL as well as a few other utilities.

After connecting to sunrise.stanford.edu via anonymous FTP, the following
files can be obtained from the pub/wcl directory:

    wcl-2.14.tar.Z - WCL distribution, including CLX and PCL.
    wgdb-4.2.tar.Z - a version of GDB modified to understand Lisp debugging
    gcc-2.1.tar.Z - GNU C compiler (not required, but *very* desirable)
	            NOTE: GCC 2.2.2 has a bug which prevents it from 
	                  working with WCL.
    lfp-paper.ps - PostScript for the WCL paper.

More information about WCL is available in the documentation directory
of the WCL distribution.  Please direct any questions or bug reports
to wcl@sunrise.stanford.edu.


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