From: zxmsd01@mailserv.zdv.uni-tuebingen.de (Gunther Schadow)
Subject: 386BSD: Prolog and LISP, current state
Summary: None of them is out.. yet
Keywords: 386 BSD Prolog LISP
Organization: Comp. Center (ZDV) U of Tuebingen, FRG
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 11:36:30 GMT

This is just to tell people interested in LISP and Prolog for 386BSD
about what I am doing.


I. Prolog

I fetched several Prologs from divers FTP sites. Among them was

	- Berkeley Prolog System (because we are Berkeley UNIX)
	- SWI-Prolog
	- SB-Prolog
	- public domain ICP 0.90

Because of recommendations I started hacking on SWI-Prolog, which was
not too hard (except for some weird behaviors of csh whether called by
make or from the shell). It compiles readily including the
gnu/unexec.c and runs to a limited degeree now. It does save, without
error, but there are some errors in memory allocation, which I hope to
fix soon.
  Today I tried on SB-Prolog, and it compiled with *no* error just by
applying "sh < INSTALL" (yes of course some warnings, but who cares!).
I wasn't able to run it, because I had no time, and it was not clear
how to do it. Even though, SB-Prolog seems easy SWI-Prolog seems to be
better.  Save facility for example, is not included in SB-Prolog.
  I spent not much time on Berkeley Prolog System and no time at all
on ICP, for some reason (which I can't remember) I gave up on Berkeley
Prolog. I hope that I can publish my port for SWI-Prolog to 386BSD
within the next three weeks. Anybody else working on SWI-Prolog?
Please contact me.


II. LISP

I started with KCL and brought it to compile and run raw_kcl, but
without the save-function, which is crucial for the further
installation of KCL. I gave up on KCL, because Alan W. Black offered
me his port for 386BSD, which I am about to bring in an easy to use
form. I ran into some trouble during initialisation of akcl (ie.
transforming raw_kcl into saved_kcl). I hope that I can fix them with
the help of Alan, I mean Alan already came across these problems I
have now. Patience please, the AKCL port will be out soon.
  It seems like we cannot distribute binaries for neither KCL nor
AKCL, due to the KCL license. But I will construct a hopefuly error
free :-) makefile or installation script, that does everything along
with a README that explains how to proceed manually.
  Since we will have AKCL soon, there will be no further need for
plain KCL. Bside AKCL I was told that there exists a port of FranzLISP
for 386BSD. FranzLISP would be nice, since it belongs to the Berkeley
UNIX distribution. The problem here is the listz, the LISP compiler,
which is highly machine specific. There is code for VAX and 68k but
none for i386. Maybe some people are interested in rewriting the listz
compiler for i386. What helps us here is, that there is a (possibly
proprietary) LISP2C compiler, which works on FranzLISP. But things wit
FranzLISP are more vague than AKCL, so don't wait for FranzLISP.


If there is anybody else hacking on LISP or Prolog for 386BSD, please
contact me, for that we can coordinate our work. Thanks.

Cheers
-Gunther
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gunther Schadow,	          e-mail: Gunther@mailserv.ZDV.Uni-Tuebingen.DE
Sudetenstrasse 25,	          Phone:  (49) 7071/37527
7400 Tuebingen, Germany.__________Stop__________Horn Please!__________O.K. TATA