Franz Lisp for 386 / BSD

An implementation of Franz Lisp, Opus 38.92 (more or less) is available for 386 and similar machines running NetBSD 0.9. The same system should work, with perhaps a few modifications, in 386BSD and FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 (or similar). Both source and executable images are available.

The executable images should work in newer versions of NetBSD and FreeBSD. A proper port to FreeBSD 2.0 should appear at some point. Linux is more difficult, but a number of problems have been fixed by patches supplied by Bruno Haible.

If anyone does make it work for other operating systems or machines, or if anyone is interested in helping with a SPARC port, please let me (j.dalton@ed.ac.uk) know. (Though I say SPARC, it's mostly the OS that will cause problems.)

So, what is it?

It's essentially the Berkeley (not Franz Inc) version of Franz Lisp that was distributed with 4.2 BSD. It is therefore appropriate that it reappear now that BSD systems are becoming more generally available.

Franz Lisp (in case you don't know) is a pre-Common Lisp Lisp, very similar to MacLisp. It's smaller and simpler than Common Lisp but doesn't have full lexical scoping. The most accessible reference is the original edition of Wilensky's LISPcraft, but this distribution includes the full reference manual, also accessible from lisp via the help function (which doesn't "evaluate it's arguments", as we used to say).

Anyway, this version of Franz has a couple of interesting features:

The compiler emits C rather than native assembler and is consequently fairly portable. The same compiler has been used on 68k Suns, VAX 750s, and ICL Perqs running PNX.
More of the interpreter is written in C than before. There's still some 386 assembly code, but not very much.

The "C port" of the compiler and fasl, and some of the conversion from assembler to C, were done by Jeff Dalton. Other changes for the 386, 386BSD, and NetBSD were by Richard Tobin.

How does one get it?

Ftp here, or via http or ftp to:

    address: ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk
       user: anonymous
   password: your net address
  directory: pub/richard/franz-for-NetBSD

You should see the following files:

  -rw-r--r--  1 richard   810784 Mar 16 12:11 franz.16Mar94.tar.gz
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 richard   289794 Oct 23 17:03 lisp.gz
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 richard   426285 Oct 23 17:04 liszt.gz

What about installation?

lisp.gz and liszt.gz are compressed, executable images for the interpreter and compiler respectively. They assume that the lisp-library-directory is /usr/local/lib/lisp.

franz.16Mar94.tar.gz contains the library and the other sources needed to rebuild the system (if that's what you want to do).

You will at least want to compile the library. Put the (decompressed) lisp and liszt somewhere in your $PATH, unpack the sources, make /usr/local/lib/lisp be a symbolic link to the lisplib subdirectory of the sources, cd to lisplib, and type "make all".

You may also be able to rebuild the system. If you want to do this, I'd recommend trying the distributed executable images first, because if they work you can use them when recompiling everything. Some information about how to rebuild can be found in the ReadMe.386 file. If you do rebuild, "make fast" and "make slow" both leave the new interpreter and compiler in franz/i386/nlisp and cliszt/in-c/nliszt respectively.

If you're interested in modifying the system, you should e-mail me, because I can tell you more about how to do it.

Jeff Dalton