[no subject]

[MATSON at MIT-MC (Wayne E. Matson)]

In trying to use the TOPS-10 version of LISP out here at Marlboro
I have encountered the following difficulties.

Not all fasl files will load.  some get "file not in fasl format".
This is similar to a problem I had with LISP 1 1/2 years ago where
it used dump mode i/o to read the fasl file, but if the last IOWD
failed.  (last block not full) it assumed that it didn't get
anything where as it really did.  jonl said that he fixed this
particular problem, so my guess is probably wrong.

doing i/o in general occasionally gets one of many varied
ill uuo ... type messages from the monitor, or
write into read only memory from lisp.  This tends to bring to
mind another old lisp bug where you played around with .jbff
and/or .jbrel before doing the initial "in" or "out" uuo's that
set up the buffer rings.  the code that did this assumed that
the monitor would alwasy build a ring of 2 buffers.  This is
NOT the case.  The number of buffers is related to the cluster
size of the disk.  again,  Im not sure that this has anything to
do with the problem at hand.  I haven't spent enough time
to figure out exactly what's going on.

minor things are
you set up the default ppn from the users ppn, not his path

lisp doesn't understand SFD's.   (this is really 2 problems)
You could run lisp out of an sfd if it would put "0" in
the 4th word of the lookup/enter block if a ppn wasn't specified.
since lisp does specify the 4th arg every time, it is impossible
to read a file form an sfd.
full sfd stuff would be nice, and probably wouldn't be very hard...

Ill send more once I get some more time to play with it again.
schedules are getting pretty tight...