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FUGUE Notes An occasional publication of the Franz Lisp User Group under Unix and Eunice (FUGUE) Number 2 (October, 1982) edited by Richard J. Fateman University of California Berkeley CA 94720 USA fateman@berkeley 1. Welcome! It seems about time to publish the second of these newsletters, since we have accumulated a number of new items. We would also like to relay to others such informa- tion as has been forwarded to us. The reports of projects at Berkeley (and elsewhere) may strike sympathetic chords with other research. 2. New programs 2.1. OPS-5 OPS-5 is a "production system" written by Charles Forgy of CMU. It appears to work just fine in Franz, and is in wide use. Interested persons may obtain copies of documen- tation and the program from Charles.Forgy@CMU-10A. ( Charles Forgy, Computer Science Department, Carnegie-Mellon Univer- sity, Pittsburgh, PA 15213) It is their policy to send it to anyone who wants it free of charge. 2.2. GLISP GLISP is a system which provides interesting linguistic features for generic operations and data abstraction. Writ- ten by Gordon Novak at Stanford University, it was origi- nally developed for Interlisp, but has been ported to other lisps, including Franz. 2.3. Flavors There are now two distinct implementations, apparently with identical functionally, of "flavors" as appearing in the MIT Lisp Machine software. One is described in TR-1174, ____________________ UNIX, Eunice, Franz Lisp, may be trademarks of Bell Labs, SRI Int'l, and Univ. of Calif. "Franz Flavors" by Richard J. Wood (Dept of C.S., Univ. of Maryland, College Pk, MD 20742). The other was written by Juan R. Loaiza of MIT, Laboratory for Computer Science. We have a copy of the latter on-line here, and expect to receive a copy of the Maryland one, shortly. Eric Cooper here at Berkeley is in charge of the flavors situation. There is an implementation of closures, mostly compati- ble with the Lisp Machine specification, announced by John Foderaro for Opus 38.33. The incompatibility is a result of what we perceive to be a high performance penalty for eso- terica. 2.4. Database Interfaces Jim Larus at UCB has cooked up interfaces to both the INGRES relational database system, and the simpler TROLL database system. These will be described in his forthcoming MS report, along with the next item. 2.5. Cursor-control and Menus Larus has provided an implementation of screen manage- ment which uses the UNIX "curses" package for primitive win- dow management. A menu-based interface has also been developed as part of this. 2.6. Vaxima and Algebraic Manipulation A new version of vaxima, the VAX version of the MACSYMA algebraic manipulation system, was released in July by UCB, incorporating some bug fixes, improved programs, and a large number of user-contributed subroutine libraries. This was made available to test-site licensees. Unfortunately, MIT has suspended new test-site licensing since about April, 1982. We hope that MIT will be liberalizing its distribu- tion policy to non-commercial sites. See the note below about MACSYMA being sold. As a counterpoint to this, UC Berkeley has received a substantial grant from the System Development Foundation for work on Mathematical Representation and Manipulation, which should result in some more advanced systems for application of computers to symbolic mathematics. Recruiting for researchers, staff, and students is underway now, and interested persons should contact Richard Fateman. 2.7. VLSI Design Rule Checker Lyra, written in Lisp by Michael Arnold, is a retarget- able, hierarchical, design rule checker for VLSI circuits. Lyra features a rule compiler (also written in Lisp of course!) which translates symbolic design rule descriptions to lisp code for checking the rules. Lyra was used for the RISC project. It is currently being used extensively at Berkeley, and will be included in the Fall-82 distribution of of the Berkeley CAD tools. For more information contact Michael Arnold or John Ousterhout at Berkeley. 2.8. Generic Arithmetic As a proposed extension to Franz arithmetic, Richard Fateman, Keith Sklower and Scott Morrison, have written a simple-minded generic arithmetic package which includes modules which can be loaded to support exact rational arith- metic, software-simulated IEEE extended arithmetic, arbi- trary precision floating point, complex, interval, and mul- tivariate polynomial. Combinations of some of these are sup- ported, although the package is as yet incomplete in some areas. The IEEE arithmetic simulation is written in C. These packages are probably not in good enough shape for casual use by others. 3. New features Various performance enhancements and bug fixes have been incorporated in versions of Franz (now on Opus 38.33 and the compiler, Liszt 8.14) These are mentioned in brief here; more details accompany updates of the system and manual included in the forthcoming Berkeley 4.2BSD UNIX dis- tribution. 3.1. Franz We added a switch to cause the evaluator to save macro expansions so they need only be expanded once. We added vector and vector-immediate data types. We rewrote showstack and backtrace so they are easier to use. We made the lisp to foreign function interface more secure. The system now allows foreign function to call lisp functions. We added closures and support flavors, features from the Lisp Machine. 3.2. Liszt Liszt will check the number of arguments to system functions and user defined functions. Liszt supports local declarations. Liszt will automatically compile lambda expressions headed by the function `function'. Liszt supports compiler-only macros and will autoload macros if necessary. 4. MC68000 Keith Sklower and Kevin Layer have been working on the MC68000 version of Franz under the UNIX operating system (using a DUAL System 83). While the current configuration is a swapping system, the Lisp should be able to use the full address space of the CPU. We expect to have this system run- ning on the UNIX 4.2 BSD SUN software, too. The base system on the DUAL, including the interpreter, reader, bignums, fasl, works; the compiler is being perfected. 5. Other Lisps We now have, in-house tried 4 (other) VAX UNIX lisp systems: YLISP, Interlisp, PSL, and VLISP. We know that Interlisp can run also on VMS using the Eunice package. Interested parties can contact David Dyer at USC-ISI. There is also a version of lisp which runs on VMS only, namely NIL, from MIT, which appears to be undergoing limited dis- tribution. Two other lisps under development under UNIX are Yale's answer to NIL, namely "T", and Common Lisp, from CMU and friends. Counting Franz, that makes 7 lisp systems for the VAX computer line. Not counting variants on 2 operating systems. A Paen to standardization. Dick Gabriel states some useful principles for com- parisons in the conference record of the 1982 ACM Lisp and Functional Programming Conference, which was held in August. We understand he now has a collection of some 18 programs which he is continuing to time on various systems. 6. Work in Progress 6.1. BITGRAPH SUN AED-512 Greg Foster at UCB is working on raster-graphics sup- port in Franz for the 800 by 1000 b/w raster displays of the BBN Bitgraph and/or the SUN Workstation, and possibly the color 512 by 512 AED system. We are probably going to han- dle mice and Bitpad (stylus) input for pointing. There are lots of projects we hear about with similar systems, e.g. just recently from the University of Maryland, using UNIX and multiplexed files for window management of a 68000-based home-grown workstation. 6.2. RISC-LISP Yes, Reduced Instruction Set Computer fans, who else but UCB would be so bold... Carl Ponder is examining the issues involved in constructing a fast lisp interpreter and compiler for the RISC architecture. You see, we have all these chips... 7. Work Contemplated 7.1. Fast Number Compiler Undergraduate Jeff Cohen at Berkeley is starting to look at this. There are several industrial concerns that have expressed interest in using such a system, but expected it to be subsidized by someone else. 7.2. IBM Franz Even more nibbles on this one, but not yet. 8. Business News 8.1. Eunice SOLD Some of you may have heard that the Eunice software package was sold by SRI to the Wollongong Group, a UNIX sup- port group in Palo Alto. Prices range from $2k (educa- tional) to $5k (commercial). Naturally this package is of interest beyond the availability of Franz Lisp. We have not compared this product to other similar ones, but we know that TWG has been distributing a working Franz opus 38. As far as alternatives to Eunice, we are aware of a system developed at Rice University, and another by Human Computing Resources (HCR) in Toronto. We have not evaluated either of these. 8.2. MACSYMA SOLD MIT has sold exclusive rights to MACSYMA, a large alge- braic manipulation system, to Symbolics, Inc. of Cambridge Mass. This package runs in Franz Lisp, (among other Lisps) We hope that soon it will again be available to educational institutions with VAX systems either from us or Symbolics, at a nominal charge. We understand that commercial licenses (from Symbolics) for versions of MACSYMA on PDP-10s, Lisp Machines, etc. will distributed at non-nominal prices and offered with maintenance contracts.