Re: Slightly Disappointing Review of MCL 2.0 in Oct MacWorld

[tar@ISI.EDU (Thomas A. Russ)]

In article <...> reich@AUSTIN.LOCKHEED.COM (Al Reich) writes:
 > As an implementation of Common Lisp, Macintosh Common Lisp gets 5
 > stars from me. MCL was the major reason I bought a Macintosh last
 > year.
 > 

I can only second this opinion.  Our project is the development and
support of a multi-platform knowledge representation language in Common
Lisp.  Our two most recent machine purchases have been Macintoshes
rather than Sun or HP Unix boxes.  The reason we bought the Macs was
because of the excellent development environment for Common Lisp.
Although the underlying hardware is not as "fast" as the workstations,
the lisp code runs much closer in speed than the hardware difference
would suggest.  Also, since we are a development team, the improved
productivity from having a very nice debugger/inspector and integrated
editor is the most significant factor.

In addition, we find that the very strict interpretation of the Common
Lisp standard means that anything we develop on the Mac will run in
other Common Lisp implementations.  If the Macintosh did not have such a
fine CL implementation we would not have purchased the machines.

--
________________________________________________________________________
Thomas A. Russ,  USC/Information Sciences Institute          tar@isi.edu    
4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292          (310) 822-1511x775