Corman Lisp sources are now available | Hacker News Reader

Corman Lisp sources are now available

lispblog.xach.com

178 points_19qg27 comments

Awesome. Here's hoping someone can clean this up and get it building with VS2013. It would be amazing to have a Windows-native free/OSS CL. Neither Allegro or LW are truly free; their "free" tools have pretty limiting restrictions on how they can be used, which mostly just leaves one with SBCL and making do with libraries for anything Windows-based (of which I'm not even sure there are many).

I think it's pretty unlikely that this will be made to work in a modern environment in a useful way. I think the primary benefit will be historical interest and possibly the reuse of some of the component parts.

http://lispblog.xach.com/post/107215169193/corman-lisp-sourc... has some more context. I'd have posted it myself directly, but xach.com is blacklisted from HN.

> I'd have posted it myself directly, but xach.com is blacklisted from HN.

Looks like this might be the cause:

  <html>
  <head>
  <title>Hacker News User Affinity Graph</title>
  <head>

  <body style='font-size: 89%; font-family: sans serif'>
  <div style='width: 450px;margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto'>


  <h1>Hacker News User Affinity Graph</h1>

  <p>What users on <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/">Hacker
  News</a> have voting behaviors most similar to yours?

  <p>[dead]

  <p>You can fake votes on Hacker News if you know your     visitor's Hacker
  News username. An easy way to get it is to trick them into thinking
  they'll get a pretty graphic for providing it. I don't know if this
  issue will be fixed, but it's not a good idea to give out your Hacker
  News username to random websites until it is.

That probably set off some auto-blacklist based on the frequency of the upvotes you received.

Maybe ask dang to unblock you?

> I'd have posted it myself directly, but xach.com is blacklisted from HN.

Strange... should be changed...

The ban on xach.com was removed a few weeks ago.

Can we get the URL changed then please, the context really helps.

Sure. Done.

Thank you!

Thanks!

That's sad to hear, but I suppose it's understandable. Hopefully someone can at least get some use out of it, and kudos for encouraging him to release it nonetheless (And to Roger Corman of course for agreeing).

I hear Clozure works well on Windows (64?).

Yup, CCL works very well, while SBCL (I think) still has serious problems with Windows in general. I generally use SBCL on my Linux machines and CCL on Windows ones, as the other alternatives (e.g. CLISP) are painfully slow.

Clozure Common Lisp (http://ccl.clozure.com) runs on Windows and it's free (LGPL).

I thought it might be called "clojure". And it runs on the Java Virtual Machine with easy linking to Java libraries. I have not programmed much in it to know whether it contains most of Common LISP.

No, Clozure Common Lisp is an implenentation of Common Lisp that runs on Windows, Linux and OSX. Clojure is a different language that targets the JVM and it's very different from Common Lisp.

For Windows I prefer CCL

My fork (https://github.com/slahn/cormanlisp) builds under VS2013, and compiles the initial image successfully. The IDE starts up, but I havn't tested it in a meaningful way yet.

Note that since the GUI uses MFC without unicode, you need VS premium or higher to compile.

Cool!

It would be interesting to see how far it gets on the ANSI test suite from http://www.cliki.net/GCL%20ANSI%20Test%20Suite

> Note that since the GUI uses MFC without unicode, you need VS premium or higher to compile.

FWIW, I was able to compile it using "Visual Studio Community 2013" after installing the Multibyte MFC Library http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4077...

Oh, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn251007.aspx says specifically that you need professional, premium or ultimate.

Glad to learn I was wrong!

There was a mailing list on Yahoo groups for Corman Lisp for those interested in browsing the history. Most of the activity occurred 2001-2003: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/cormanlisp/info

Fantastic. Thanks for doing this.

Esp. the compiler and FFI is super simple, much simpler than SBCL. I was one of the few people who worked with it those times.

I feel Roger's pain with the MSVC changes over time. But I don't think porting it to the newer compilers or mingw64-gcc would be that hard.

Corman Lisp is good as a learning tool for Lisp. I had tried it out some, a while earlier, and also corresponded with the creator, Roger Corman. Interestingly, some time ago, he was looking for Lisp developers for a project in Lisp.

It might have been at some point in the past, but it doesn't run on modern systems, does not fully implement Common Lisp, and can't run much of the useful software written in the past 10 or so years.

It's still pretty cool, but not as a learning tool in 2015.

I don't agree with your points.

1. It ran for me on Windows 7 not too long back - a year or so ago, IIRC. 2. I did not say that it fully implements Common Lisp. I said is useful as a learning tool - meaning for beginners to Lisp. This scenario is quite possible and can make sense for beginners: install an easy-to-setup-and-start-using tool like Corman Lisp; try learning _some_ of the basics of Lisp for some time using such a tool; if you find that you understand it well enough, and are interested enough to proceed further, THEN find a better/more advanced/professional Lisp and start using it. In other words, gradual learning curve, less investment of time (on installation/setup, etc.) at the start, etc. All good reasons. 3. A beginner is likely not going to want to run "much of the useful software written in the past 10 years" - or however many years. A beginner is going to want to learn the basics of the language - by definition.

And I was talking about beginners in my previous comment - hence used the term "learning tool".

I think anyone who wants to be able to stick with a system as they grow, get supportive help from an active user base, reuse the work of others in the form of useful libraries, and not worry about the viability and future of their development environment should use something like LispWorks, Allegro CL, Clozure CL, or SBCL. LispWorks and Allegro CL are just as easy to install and use on Windows as Corman Lisp.

1. That's exactly one of my points. I don't thing it is necessary for a user to stick with one system as they grow. A user may prefer to start with a very simple tool, use it for a while, then move on to a more powerful but somewhat more complex tool. I guess it is a difference of opinion there.

2. I had also tried out LispWorks and Allegro CL. It was a while ago, so don't remember exact details, but IIRC, either or both of them was not so easy to _use_ as Corman Lisp was - for beginners, mind you. Both were easy to install though. Note: I am not criticizing those two products on grounds of technical quality. I had read up a lot about Lisp in general, plus specifically about various prominent companies and individuals in the field, and the work that they had done, earlier, before trying out these tools, and so I know that both of those companies are by very accomplished Lisp people. It's just that I didn't find them that easy to use as a beginner to Lisp, compared to Corman Lisp.

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