[Gcl-devel] gcl/acl2

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!  After a few days of consolidation, it appears as if gcl is
now successfully building acl2 on all 11 Debian architectures(!).  The
same gcl is likewise successfully building and testing maxima on all
11.  To this we can probably add sparc solaris, Windows, and the
*BSD's with possibly a little work.  

I think that this fact now justifiably earns GCL a unique distinction
among the free lisp systems -- it is the only, to my knowledge, free
lisp vehicle that carries all known open-source lisp applications (I
am only aware of these two, alas) to practically all current hardware,
and at good performance.  Congratulations to all.

So GCL is shaping up to be a very portable, quick, and *practical*
lisp, albeit rather non-ansi compliant at present.  Once the
compliance is achieved, we will hopefully be in good shape to propose
including gcl as the standard common lisp compiler in the gcc compiler
suite.

Matt, regarding acl2, I would like to add a test run to the build
process for the Debian binary package.  I can't use up too much cpu
time on the slowest machines.  Ideally, I'd like something thorough
that wold take 1/3 to 1/2 of the compilation time, and would produce an
output which would be easily machine readable to detect any error.  I
think you had mentioned in the past that you could suggest something.
The certify-books takes too long, I think.  :mini-proveall might work,
but I don't know how I can detect any failure with certainty.  Any
suggestions are most appreciated.

Also, a Debian user has already brought up a minor issue in the emacs
lisp interface regarding differences between xemacs and GNU emacs.  He
is suggesting the following:

=============================================================================
(defun acl2-shared-lisp-mode-map ()
  "Return the shared lisp-mode-map, independent of Emacs version."
  (if (boundp 'shared-lisp-mode-map)
      shared-lisp-mode-map
    lisp-mode-shared-map))

and replacing references to shared-lisp-mode-map with
(acl2-shared-lisp-mode-map) ought to work.  (I actually even tested
the approach with GNU Emacs 20, GNU Emacs 21, and XEmacs 21 this
time; I get byte-compiler warnings, but that's all. ;-))
=============================================================================

Do you have any thoughts here?

Lastly, I'd be most appreciate if you or some other knowledgeable acl2
user could look at the package and comment as to whether everything is
available and in the right place.

After I put the acl2 tests in, I'll try to do a final summary of the
state of gcl/maxima/acl2 on the various known machines.

Take care,
-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
==========================================================================
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah