New CLASP, with CLIP

[straz@cambridge.apple.com (Steve Strassmann)]

Date: Mon, 10 Jan 94 17:24:03 -0500
From: David Hart <dhart@cs.umass.edu>
To: binford@peace.stanford.edu, CXEA@MCGILLA.BITNET, DAMBROSI@CS.ORST.EDU,
        duffy@mda.ecs.umass.edu, JD05@GTE.COM, JLOUCH@POLYSLO.CSC.CALPOLY.EDU,
        MANEX@applelink.apple.com, MARCOS@TAOS.INTEL.COM, MCW@CS.RICE.EDU,
        STEVENS@CS.COLORADO.EDU, STRAZ@CAMBRIDGE.APPLE.COM
Subject: New CLASP, with CLIP

Hello again,

Though I'm sure we've long since exhausted your patience, I'd like to announce
at last the availability of an industrial strength version of CLASP, the Common
Lisp Analytical Statistics Package.  Never fully satisfied with the previous
version, which was still too wedded to the TI Explorer for our tastes, we have
developed a new version using CLOS and CLIM that now runs on a variety of
platforms.  While not yet as powerful as we would like, it provides the basic
functionality you'd expect from a statistics package.  Its unique and most
powerful feature is its CLIM interface, complete with a "notebook" that is both
a "desktop" for icons and a Lisp interactor pane.  It uses BBN's SciGraph
package for plotting, which is a publicly available and extensible CLIM-based
system.

We have also developed a Common Lisp Instrumentation Package (CLIP) which is
available along with CLASP.  CLIP is designed to allow AI system developers and
evaluators a portable way to define and manage "alligator clips" for
instrumenting their programs.  CLIP produces data about program behavior in
CLASP format, as well as other commonly used data formats.  It currently has
facilities to support experiment design, such as scenario scripting and
factorial combination of independent variables, and can collect data in summary
form (at the end of each trial) or based upon the occurrence of specific events
(both periodic and non-periodic).

Development of both CLASP and CLIP continue, and are largely driven by user
demand.  If you try it and like it, but uncover bugs or would like to see other
features added, please let us know at clasp-support@cs.umass.edu.              

CLASP is available at ftp.cs.umass.edu in the directory pub/eksl/clasp.  CLIP is
available under the directory pub/eksl/clip.  A tutorial on CLASP can be found
in pub/eksl/clasp-tutorial.


Dave Hart                                                               
Experimental Knowledge Systems Laboratory       413-545-3278
Computer Science Dept., LGRC                    413-545-1249 (fax)
University of Massachusetts                             dhart@cs.umass.edu
Box 34610
Amherst, MA  01003-4610