Genera 8.0 Announcement

[RDP@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lasc-research.lockheed.com (Robert D. Pfeiffer))]

    Date: Mon, 5 Mar 90 09:24 EST
    From: JR@YUKON.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Johanna Rothman)

    [...]

    I will make sure that any other points you brought up in your mail will be addressed.

I have a few brief questions.

    Date: Fri, 2 Mar 90 10:57 EST
    From: groberts@YUKON.SCRC.Symbolics.COM, jr@YUKON.SCRC.Symbolics.COM

    This letter went out in hardcopy to all customers this week. The sales
    reps also received this letter. If you have questions, please address
    them to your sales rep, Gary Roberts, or Johanna Rothman.

    [...]

    Support for the Creation of Portable Code: Genera 8.0 supports the
    Common Lisp Object Standard (CLOS), part of the ANSI Lisp draft
    standard, for portability of object-oriented Lisp programs.  Symbolics
    support for CLOS includes a Zmacs-based utility for converting existing
    programs from Flavors to CLOS.

We're very anxiously awaiting the capability to DUMP-FORMS-TO-FILE on
CLOS instances.  Will this be supported by the release?

    The Common Lisp Developer, included in Genera 8.0, is a tool which aids
    in developing and testing Common Lisp programs on a Symbolics system.  A
    programmer working under the CL Developer is automatically guided toward
    writing code that conforms to a strict interpretation of Common Lisp
    (Steele), thus increasing the ability to port the program to any other
    Common Lisp environment.

Has this been or will this be updated for the new (1990) 2nd edition of
Steele?

    [...]

    New Garbage Collection Option: The programmer may choose to use the
    new in-place garbage collector, reducing application memory
    requirements.

This isn't a question.  I just couldn't resist throwing in the comment
that this is cool.  Under Genera 8.0 Beta, I've let my machine almost
run out of memory and then done a GC in-place and kept it alive for
additional weeks!