Procyon Common Lisp

[futrell@corwin.ccs.northeastern.edu (robert futrelle)]

I had good luck with Procyon, developing a bunch of diagram
analysis (computer vision) code on it while waiting for CLOS to
appear with Genera 8.0.  When it did, porting required only
changing some file names for loading, and realizing that 
future-common-lisp (*future-common-lisp* ?) was the appropriate
"pure CLOS" (no flavors) package to use.

On the Mac I found that Procyon was reasonably fast in compilation
and execution. (I ran no benchmarks.)  It has an editor that
can run in a reasonable look-a-like of emacs mode.  Its inspector
was quick and useful for looking at data structures. Its ability
to trace and step code and to examine the stack was a weak point.

I found no real bugs in Procyon itself.  The best part for me
was that I could develop serious CL/CLOS code at home, at any
time of day or night on my Mac.

Probably the most difficult task it had was to update classes
and methods on the fly as I altered my code.  It rarely got
confused doing this, so I was happy.  Now my code has been
handed over to my students and I hardly touch Procyon.
(Too busy writing papers explaining what all we accomplished!)

They have an "Action" environment for GUI development. It looks
fine from what I read and saw at AAAI, but I hate to see still
another set of interface tools.  They're thinking about CLIM
but they may just sit tight with their proprietary product.

On the other hand, I want CLIM myself under Genera.
Where is it??

bob futrelle, biological knowledge lab, CS, Northeastern U., Boston