Symbolics prices (not only in Europe)

[simon%liasun5.epfl.ch@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM (Simon Leinen)]

Barmar> What can't a Lispm do, you ask?  It can't run the thousands
Barmar> of commercial and publicly-available programs that are
Barmar> available for Unix systems, Macs and PC's.

Reti> Yes, but there is no single workstation that can run the
Reti> thousands of commercial and publicly-available programs that are
Reti> available for Unix systems, Macs AND PC's.  If you have a
Reti> Mac-only program, you need a Mac to run it (or a Mac emulation
Reti> package) [...]

Yes, but there are

  thousands of commercial and publicly-available programs for Unix,
  thousands of commercial and publicly-available programs for Macs
AND
  thousands of commercial and publicly-available programs for PCs;

... so if you have just one of these machines, you already have a good
chance to find a program that suits you.  Normally you don't ``have a
Mac-only program'', you have a need for some kind of software.

Reti> In fact, often the most cost-effective solution IS to have
Reti> multiple workstations, one for each type of incompatible program
Reti> you are trying to run.

Once again, it is clear that you don't have a compatibility problem as
long as you only use Symbolics machines.  This just doesn't invalidate
Barmar's arguments.

Reti> when we ported several VLSI tools to the Symbolics C the
Reti> type-checking found several unitialized variable-style bugs
Reti> which would have caused wrong answers on traditional
Reti> architecture machines.)

This is the great advantage of portable software.  By recompiling C
programs with an ANSI C compiler (GCC) and warnings enabled, I found
many errors, some very old.  But I also found many errors when I tried
to compile CLUE (developed by TI on Explorers) on a Common Lisp
running on a conventional machine.

If you would port some of the Genera software to a Lisp with a
compiler that has strong type checking and type inference, you would
certainly find several bugs that ``would have'' (?) caused wrong
answers on Symbolics machines.
-- 
Simon Leinen.
Laboratoire d'Intelligence Artificielle
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
MA-Ecublens
CH-1015 Lausanne
Tel.: ++41-21-693-5277