MACLISP on CMUA

[Scott Fahlman at CMU-10A (C380SF50)]

Howard,
        A month after we asked for it to be installed (slow systems
people around here) MACLSP and COMPLR are on SYS: at CMUA, and they
have been announced to a hungry world.  Since we still lack sections 4-n
of the new manual (is it being worked on?) I am encouraging people with
small problems of short duration to use the old UCI lisp and telling
people starting major projects to go with MACLISP.
        Dave Touretzky and Dave McDonald have done some interesting things
to overcome the lossages of using the system here.  Look at MACLSP.DIR,
EXAMPL.INI, and SLURP.MCL on [c380ml5p] if you are interested.  The INIT
file fixes useful autoloads to point to the right things, and the slurp
package is an I/O front end that does useful decoding of local PPNs.
We have a bit of a problem with autoloads in the COMPLR, since it doesn't
get set up by an INIT file, but we kludge around it.  The UCI-lisp editor
has been converted, though it is far inferior to using LEDIT and EMACS.
It saves top-level comments, but only wins with ; comments within functions
if they occur where a random NIL is OK.  And the comments live in core,
at present at least.  We may try to write a package that merges code from
the core image and comments from the old file, but this will be hairy.
        NETL runs fine here, and McDonald has converted the SRI Diamond
parser to run in MACLISP (converted from interlisp).  Anyway, thanks again
for your help, and let us know when and if the CDR of the manual appears.
                                Regards,
                                Scott Fahlman