Brasstacks

I don't know what this says about Lispers' attitudes toward automated testing, or toward the RT test framework, but the commonly-distributed versions of the RT test framework did not pass their own self-tests. The apparent cause is that the introduction of a hash-table and tail-pointer in rt.lisp to efficiently find tests by name and insert new tests at the end of the test list were not matched by the updating of the rt-test.lisp to consistently construct the miniature mock-up test suite. This diff for rt-test.lisp , introduces code to dynamically rebind those variables. The patch, in addition to one putting the self-tests into a separate package, has been applied to the HEAD of the CVS repository for GNU CLISP . Note that changing the package changes the names of the tests themselves, which requires editing the expected output in the tests. Note how powerful and convenient the dynamic binding feature of Lisp (optional, as it should be, in Common Lisp) can be: while running...

While I'm still digesting COMFY in my "ample spare time," a post on comp.sys.apple2 mentioned some assemblers from "Ron" having a similar flavor : SPL for the 6502 and PIC0 for PIC 10F2xx microcontrollers . They are apparently implemented in Python, and inspired by Forth. They emit assembler.

Using my MacIvory, until now, I have been using an old Mac Powerbook running Mac OS 9 with AppleTalk file-sharing to allow me to copy files from a USB key to the Mac IIfx host running 7.6.1. Trying to access shared folders on my newer laptop running Mac OS X failed, as did sharing in the opposite direction. Presumably, the problem is that Mac OS X uses a revision of the AFP file-sharing protocol which is incompatible with the version used by the default Mac OS 7.6.1. It turns out there is a fix for this issue: Install Open Transport 1.1.2 (a dependency for the next step) on the 7.6.1 Mac Install AppleShare Client 3.8.3 on the 7.6.1 Mac The Apple article on AppleShare Client 3.8.3 has more information on this release of the software. Apparently AppleShare 3.8.8 requires System 8.

As I alluded to in an earlier post, Symbolics Genera takes a slightly different approach to packages than most current environments (such as SLIME under Emacs). Part of that is because, unlike GNU Emacs today, the editor and all its intelligence is running inside the Lisp environment; another part is due to Genera supporting multiple dialects of Lisp, each slightly compatible with the other. One consequence is that Zmacs pays close attention to the "file attributes line" in your Lisp source files. (That's the line at the beginning of the file which contains the marker "-*-"). Other Lisp environments use a heuristic, like looking for the first IN-PACKAGE form. A chicken-and-egg problem arises when loading a file that expects to be read in a particular package. What if the package doesn't exist? Well, it isn't possible to use that package to read the file. But the package itself is defined in a file. For me this caused a bit of confusion, because i...