Re: Symbolics sales support

["William D. Gooch" <ai.gooch@MCC.COM>]

    Date: Thu, 8 Jun 89 12:41:38 CDT
    From: Chunka Mui <chunka@Andersen.COM>

	    Date: Thu, 8 Jun 89 10:24 CDT
	    From: uunet!MCC.COM!ai.gooch (William D. Gooch)

		there are many here who feel that a Sun Sparcstation with
		SPE1.1/Lucid 3.0 is a very attractive alternative.

	    That's a whole other set of issues.  I can give you some more specific
	    feedback if you're interested (as one who has used some of the SPE bits
	    in their earlier incarnation).

    Actually, this last issue is one that I'd like more specific feedback
    on -- as we're facing serious a LispM or SUN decision point right now.

I've received several requests for info since I sent this out, so I'm
posting this general response to the mailing list to save time.  Allow
me to clarify my earlier statement by saying that I have not used SPE
1per se0, but have had experience in the past with some of the software
that has gone into SPE for knowledge based applications.  It is now my
understanding (as I found out since I sent the earlier message) that the
stuff I used, although it is in SPE currently, is undocumented, and some
of it ultimately may not be included in "the real" SPE.

In general, it looks like SPE will be filling in some of the gaps in
environmental support for non-Symbolics hardware.  This includes things
such as a reasonable debugger (without any solution for the dilemma of
the compiler optimizing out debug info to get decent performance), some
window support (but nothing on the level of DW/presentation system),
CLOS with some knowledge-engineering oriented extensions and a windowy
interface, Gnu-Emacs type editor, performance metering tools (with some
caveats about accuracy), an inspector, "ephemeral" GC, and a subset of
InterViews.  Rather than taking an integrated approach from the ground
up, SPE is really an agglomeration of disparate pieces from various
origins being integrated after the fact.

I will be at SLUG Wednesday morning through about noon Friday, so feel
free to look me up there.