Re: Selling Lisp

[poeck@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de (Karsten Poeck)]

>I am looking for ideas on how to present a case for developing applications
>originally in lisp and when necessary, using a translator to take it to C.  I
I do not necessarily think that this is a good idea, but one commercial
partner forced us to do this.

You can use CLICC from Kiel University for this. It is written in CL and
compiles to C. CLICC defines a subset of CL and CLOS, basically all
operations that convert a symbol to a first class object are forbidden.

The current CLICC runs in Allegro, Lucid?, CMU, AKCL and CLISP, we have
patches to make it run under MCL and LispWorks.

The C code runs best with a gcc, we have some patches that make it run on a
powermac with CodeWarrior 5. On a 68K mac the application gives an error in
garbage collection, but this can probably be fixed.

>From the CLICC readme

------------------------------------------------------------------

 CLiCC is a Common Lisp to C Compiler.  It generates C-executables
 from Common Lisp application programs. CLiCC is not a Common Lisp
 system.  Hence it does  not  include any  program  development or
 debugging support.  CLiCC is intended to  be used as an  addon to
 existing Common Lisp systems for generating portable applications.

 CLiCC supports a subset of Common Lisp + CLOS, which we call CL_0
 (CommonLisp_0).  CL_0  is a strict and very large  subset of full
 Common Lisp + CLOS, without  (EVAL ...) and friends.  At present,
 CL_0 is based on CLtL1,  but  we  are  working towards  CLtL2 and
 ANSI-CL.

 The target language is a subset of C. CLiCC is adaptable to gene-
 rate ANSI-C or K&R-C by using a compiler option.  The generated C
 code is compilable using  a conventional C compiler on the target
 machine,  and must be  linked with the  CLiCC runtime library  in
 order to generate executables.

 -----------------------------------------------------------------

           CLiCC is available via anonymous ftp from

           ftp.informatik.uni-kiel.de  (134.245.15.114)
           file: kiel/apply/clicc-0.6.4.tar.gz

 -----------------------------------------------------------------


 Karsten A. Poeck, Lehrstuhl fuer Informatik VI, Universitaet Wuerzburg
 Allesgrundweg 12, 97218 Gerbrunn, Germany
 E-mail: poeck@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
 Tel ++ 49  931 70561 18, Fax ++ 49 931 70561 20
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