bugs in tops-10 lisp (from FININ@mit-ai)

[DEWOLF at WPAFB-AFAL]

Dear Jonl et. al.;

I'm enclosing a file which describes some of the problems
that we've encountered in the new lisp.  The major one
has to do with the reading of .INI files.  Lisp seems to
get garbled characters when it reads one.

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This file documents bugs and problems in the new Lisp.  

[1] .INI files
   Initialization files are not being read properly.  More
   often than not, some characters in a .INI file are mis-read.

[2] Supressing a .INI file
   There is no way to supress the reading of a .INI file.  Specifically,
	RUN COM:NLISP;
	RUN COM:NLISP; . 
   do not work.

[3] BPS space fixed
  From Peter Dewolf[1,762] on April 5, 1979 at 2:33 PM
  sigh.    One would have hoped that the bibopification of tops-10 lisp
  would not have precluded expansion of bps.

   From Maclisp[5,720] on April 5, 1979 at 2:44 PM
   MIT claims that this is due to a misfeature of TOPS-10.  On ITS, List
   spaces grow from one end of core and BPS space grows from another.  BPS
   space should always be contiguous.  As I have been told, on TOPS-10, one
   can only expand core in one direction.

   From Peter Dewolf[1,762] on April 5, 1979 at 2:44 PM
   I recall seeing (during my scan of lisp.new) that they were adding assembly
   conditionals based on processor type--ka, ki, kl.   If you are on a ki or kl
   running under a virtual memory monitor, you can do core allocation with PAGE.
   UUOs, which allow you to allocate a page anywhere you want.  The only thing
   you have to be careful of doing is shrinking core with a CORE UUO, which will
   deallocate the non-contiguous pages too.  Given this fact, I wonder why they
   complain about tops-10?  Maybe they don7t want to do much work on a tops-10
   version of maclisp, and hence do not want to have to write code that will
   check if you are using a vm monitor (which is easy to check) and do page. uuo
   core allocation if so.  (another probelm with that is that individual users
   may or may not have the ability to go virtual.  I would hope that they could
   use page. uuos within their physical cormax, though!)
   

[4]  ^U disabled
  From Peter Dewolf[1,762] on April 5, 1979 at 2:36 PM
  is it my imagination, or does ^U no longer work in nlisp to erase the
  current line?
 
 Yes indeed, ^U has been disabled.  I don't know if there is a substitute,
 or if one can be programed easily.
 
	Tim

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As a whole, this versions seems to run pretty well.

Tim