Using Lisp on Local Machines

Allegro Common Lisp (ACL), v6.0 from Franz Inc.

ACL is available on SUN UltraSPARCs (basement of TAY) and Linux PC's (Intel Lab, PAI 1.44). The setup for all machines is the same. The executable is /lusr/bin/acl everywhere.

The documentation that comes with ACL, which is in HTML, and can be found on the CS Unix machines by starting with /lusr/lib/franz/acl60/doc/introduction.htm.

You may run ACL in two ways:

  1. By just typing acl from the UNIX shell.
  2. (Better) Running it as a subprocess of the Emacs text editor. See the latest instructions for running ACL 6.0 in Emacs.

See trace file of running ACL in Emacs. See Allegro tips for a few tips on handling errors, aborting executions, and loading and compiling files. For a longer list of ACL commands have a look here. Also browse the items that ACL adds to the Emacs menu.

Emacs

If you are unfamiliar with the Emacs text editor, it is executed with the UNIX command emacs. See web pages on Gnu Emacs such as the department Emacs info or others like this Emacs Tutorial or get the official manual:
GNU Emacs Manual, R. Stallman, Free Software Foundation (order page).

Gnu Common Lisp (GCL), v2.2 from Free Software Foundation

GCL is available on IBMs and SUN SPARCs. The executable is /p/bin/gcl. You simply type lisp or gcl to execute GCL. You may also run GCL as a subprocess of Emacs. In this case, follow the same procedure as in running ACL in Emacs but this time issue M-x run-lisp command to load GCL.