Hello

[gat@aig.jpl.nasa.gov (Erann Gat)]

Hello everyone,

Although I have been using CLisp for about a year I just now signed up for
the mailing list.  (Don't ask me how I missed it for all this time -- I don't
know myself!)  I'd like to tell you a bit about what I'm using it for, and
find out who is currently doing active development on it.

I work at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, which is responsible for unmanned
exploration of the solar system for NASA.  I am involved in a project to
develop an advanced architecture for controlling autonomous spacecraft.
This project is part of a project called New Millenium whose purpose is to
develop inexpensive spacecraft for the year 2000 and beyond (hence the name).
I am using CLisp to prototype a spacecraft executive based on a control
methodology called conditional sequencing.  I won't bore you with the
details; if anyone is interested, contact me.

The current project is only a prototype, but I am also interested in using
Lisp for actual flight code.  I am a bit of a lone warrior in this, as Lisp
is widely perceived by people in NASA to be too big and slow for "real" work.
My approach is, rather than arguing with people, to instead build working
systems that meet all the performance requirements.  Towards this end, I and
a student of mine (with considerable help from Bruno) have ported CLisp (the
January 1995 version) to vxWorks, which is a real-time operating system that
is one of the lead candidates for use on flight hardware.

So that's what I'm up to.  I am interested in hearing from people who are
actively developing CLisp, especially if anyone else out there is interested
in using it in a cross-compiled or embedded environment.  Also, is anyone
working on lightweight threads?

Erann Gat
gat@jpl.nasa.gov