Installing QSIM on a Non-supported Common Lisp

QSIM has been developed using standard Common Lisp. As a result, it can usually be ported to most versions of Common Lisp with a minimal amount of effort. Currently, the distribution provided has only been debugged for Allegro CL and Lucid CL. It also may work fine for Harlequin Lisp. The changes for harlequin were made by somebody outside of our research group so I do not know what type of problems you might encounter. If you have questions or problems, please send mail to clancy@cs.utexas.edu.

The following suggestions should help you install QSIM using a different version of lisp.

• Most of the problems occur within the Common Lisp Defsystem and Logical Pathname code. This code was obtained from CMU. Documentation for the code is included in the c-lisp directory within this distribution. The code itself is well documented.

  I recommend that you try to install QSIM without these facilities. Look at the file start-nq-no-defsystem.lisp which should be in the nq directory and change the declaration of the special variables at the beginning of the file and then load the file.

  Then run the function:

  (compile-qsim)

  In the future, QSIM can be loaded by loading the same file and running (load-qsim). The file that actually has the load statements is nq/source/main/nq-no-defsystem.

  If you run into problems doing this here are some suggestions to help you through them:

  • An error occurs when compiling a file. You might want to simply try and load the non-binary version of the file and see if you can get through the compilation process. A number of facilities are provided within the distribution that you will probably never use. Sometimes, these may cause problems in installation. By loading the lisp version, you avoid the compiler preventing you from getting everything else from running.
  • Problems with undefined special variables. Some lisps load after compiling and some do not. Also, some Lisps will complain if they encounter a special variable that is not initialized. This happens if it is declared in a preceding file and it does not have an (eval-when (compile) ... around it. If you modify the file that compiles the source files so that it loads some of the files immediately after compiling them, then this problem can be avoided. You can find out which file is causing the problem by doing a grep for the offending special variable.
  • If you keep running into problems, you might want to try and load the Lisp source files first and see if you can get things running.
  • If you get a continuable error, continue and see what happens.
• If you wish to use the Defsystem and logical pathname code, then attempt to get these components running independent of QSIM using an example defsystem that is included within the distribution. It is in the c-lisp directory. Once the Defsystem code is running you should not have much difficulty.
• You will not be able to use the ``compile-qsim'' and ``load-qsim'' functions if you are using a different lisp. These functions simply call common lisp defsystem functions. Look at the declarations of these functions in clisp/defsystem-patches.lisp.
• Ignore warnings when compiling QSIM. I would only be concerned with error messages.
• The function qplot-end-display in the file xpos/qplot-primitives will need to be modified. To display the results of a simulation, the POS package writes to a file and then forks a Unix process that executes the xbatch program. This program displays the results which are stored in this file. Qplot-end-display makes the lisp call that forks this process. Currently, the code will work for lucid, allegro and kcl. A new line with a read-time conditional will need to be added to this function for any new lisps that are used.
• If you have problems getting the function call to xbatch to work, a temporary work around is to route the output to a postscript file (select CH from the qsim-display menu) and then manually display this file using ghostview.