Comment by amszmidt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amszmidt | Hacker News Reader

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> ZWEI is no longer in the base system. EH does not exist, a Window system does not exist. Dynamic Windows is in the base system.

Nobody will use Genera without Zmacs or the error handler (aka Debugger)…

System 200 ran in the CADR and 3600. Using the same code base, with different microcode. With just bunch of #+ and #-.

And no, the target is not that important that it makes up “80% of the system”.

Your going into tangents and constantly raising neg things not being discussed, we aren’t talking about the host architecture but about the Lisp Machine system which is mostly agnostic of the target CPU. And between those two, Genera and the MIT system, are essentially the same when it comes to the base layer. To the point you can take the Dynamic listener or even DW and have it running on a MIT system without much work.

Genera 9 (which started development just a few years ago going of a system that hadn’t been touched for 30 years and under dubious legal situation) is essentially Genera 8.5 with several fixes.

Genera was carefully designed to keep compatibility with the MIT system. And that is one of the reasons why feature and code are so similar.

> Nobody will use Genera without Zmacs or the error handler (aka Debugger)…

Nobody will run Genera without TCP/IP and a lot of other stuff.

The error handler is not the same anymore.

> you can take the Dynamic listener or even DW and have it running on a MIT system without much work

I think that's pure fantasy.

> Genera was carefully designed to keep compatibility with the MIT system.

I don't think that was a goal, given that the MIT system was not relevant anymore and the vendors all had their own forks. TI converted much of the old code to Common Lisp with a translator. Symbolics wrote most new code in Common Lisp.

Without an extensive implementation of Common Lisp incl. CLOS, basically nothing runs on the old system.

The times of a few conditional reader macros was soon over.

Does Portable Common LOOPS (PCL) run on the MIT Lisp Machine?

https://github.com/binghe/PCL/tree/master/impl

It lacks a port, but there are ports to TI and Symbolics. That should be simple.

> Nobody will run Genera without TCP/IP and a lot of other stuff.

Plenty of people still do, e.g. on a Ivory or 36xx machines.

> I think that's pure fantasy.

I ported the Dynamic Listener (with large parts of DW) a bunch of years back to run on MIT System 78.

> ... MIT system was not relevant anymore ...

I realise you like to raise Symbolics to the skies, but to say that the MIT system, which then was continued by LMI was "not relevant" is just making up history. Both systems where still heavily used until the demise of Symbolics, and LMI and portability was absolutely one goal since breaking peoples code was not considered nice.

> Does Portable Common LOOPS (PCL) run on the MIT Lisp Machine?

No idea, LOOP on the MIT Lisp Machine is the standard Loop, feel free to port it though -- patches welcome as they say.

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