[ REQ 5133]: Geomview and lisp

["Mark Phillips" <mbp>]

I'm just forwarding this to software@geom for the record.  No action
is necessary; I've already responded.

--Mark


Date: Thu, 13 Oct 94 15:58:45 -0700
From: jsp at betz.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero)
Posted-Date: Thu, 13 Oct 94 15:58:45 -0700
To: mbp at geom
Subject: Geomview and lisp


| The geomview lisp interpreter is not very well documented in
| general because I am strongly considering phasing it out and
| replacing it with a real lisp interpreter in a future
| version of geomview...

I'd be interested in hearing more about this; Some
cooperation might prove mutually beneficial at some point.

I've spent the last decade supporting anatomical
visualization at the Dept of Biological Structure here...
version 4 of my package (Skandha) consists of xlisp (a small
free lisp) extended with object classes for the obvious GL
things: cameras, 4x4matrices, materials, textures...

Version 4 is just coming online, but looks somewhat
promising; We have a couple of people doing projects based
on it now, and 2-3 lisp-coded applications built on top of
it.

I've been a bit disappointed with the inefficiency of xlisp,
however... seems to be about 50,000 inst/sec, roughly.  I've
known that from the start, but it's proving a bit more
limiting than I'd hoped.  A sparetime project of mine
includes a bytecode interpreter that does more like
1Mbytecode/sec, and I've been thinking about merging the two
at some point...

I just discovered Geomview, and am basically pleased as
punch -- it fits right into the copyleft/extended-lisp
paradigm I like -- and am in particular pretty impressed by
the source code quality (kudos all around!), although I do
have the impression Geomview is crashing now and then (and I
notice there seems no testsuite distributed with the
package...?)

Anyhow, at the moment I'm just trying to see if I can use
the geomview oogl (and specifically off) disk I/O code...
supporting off format looks like a nice route to Geomview
and allied tools, and thence to AVS, which we are also
starting to use.  The Geomview code looks very cleanly
organized, but I haven't seen any explicit docs on what
goes in the separate .a files or whether it is supposed to
be practical to use them outside the Geomview context, so
I'm just digging around... :)

So are you still thinking of a "real lisp", and if so do
you have in mind something bytecoded or something like
GNU CommonLisp or CMU Lisp or ... ?

  Jeff Prothero
  Graphics Hacker, Bottlewasher and Crew of the Captain's Gig
  jsp at biostr.washington.edu