Well, maybe I''m not wording well else where. I tried AI, here at gamedev. I simply want to know if the Lisp that I downloaded off the ANSI Common Lisp (CL) site requires a virtual machine. I''m asking this question only because I believe that the compiling Lisp into machine code would one of the few coolest things in the world. In the documentation I have found reference to a compiler and another compiler command to compile Lisp into C. It seems to me that if the compiler can compile into C it should then be very easy to compile it into an executable. However i was hoping for some guidance on finding all the right libraries for this (under windows.) Thanks L- " ''No one has control -- control is just a fantasy. And being human is difficult.'' "

That depends on which you downloaded. Most don''t (clisp does) but also most don''t support compiling into "an executable" - they require runtime support from the lisp environment even though they compile to native machine code. Even very recent CMUCLs, which do support compiling into an executable, just bundle the "lisp" program and the corefile into an ELF image and play tricks with a stub program to extract them properly into memory.

GCL compiles via C but cannot build standalone executables - I guess this is the one you downloaded.

quote:
GCL compiles via C but cannot build standalone executables - I guess this is the one you downloaded.

Oops. Wrong there. Look at http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=D5t3G9.ED3%40cogsci.ed.ac.uk for an example.

I downloaded the one from sourceforge, which I followed from the ANSI Common Lisp site. The down load was remarkably small. Anyway thanks for the tip. I understand some of the functionality of lisp has to be placed into the executable (whichever packages I use) and their functionality is pretty much identical to running the Lisp expressions on an interpreter. However, for the sake of distribution I was hoping to sort of bottle of the application as a single peice (ie an executable.)

Any ideas?

Thanks btw,
L-

" ''No one has control -- control is just a fantasy. And being human is difficult.'' "

I believe that you can do this in Corman Lisp with no tricks, if you are still interested. (Though I'm not sure there is a *nix version.)

[edited by - woodsman on January 7, 2004 11:29:07 PM]

I haven''t been to the Corman Lisp site, or no anything about it, but how portable is the Corman Lisp to ANSI Common Lisp. I guess what I''m asking is if the two are compatible, and if they are not then what are the differences? I''m a little foggy on that and would appreciate it if someone who uses either nows the difference. But I plan on checking out the Corman Site soon.

Thanks,
L-

quote: Original post by Lucidquiet
I haven''t been to the Corman Lisp site, or no anything about it, but how portable is the Corman Lisp to ANSI Common Lisp.

Corman Lisp is an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp, amongst other things.