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From: shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs)
Newsgroups: net.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Query -- Portable Standard Lisp from Univ of Utah
Message-ID: <3133@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 3-Dec-84 15:08:22 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.3133
Posted: Mon Dec  3 15:08:22 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 5-Dec-84 00:48:24 EST
References: <1571@psuvax1.UUCP>
Organization: Univ of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 40

As the flamingest person in the PSL group at Utah (:-)), I have been
selected to officially respond to the PSL query.  Lest I be
accused of partiality, let me just say that I used to do a lot
of Franz hacking, and have diddled with Zetalisp some also.

PSL is *not* buggy.  More accurately, it is no more buggy than
Franz or Zetalisp (read the franz-friends mailing list sometime!).
In over a year of substantial PSL hacking, I have only encountered
about two bona-fide bugs.  I *have* had problems with various
options; PSL provides many more ways to screw yourself than
does Franz!  But normal users don't do those sorts of things
anyway (like messing with *compress, stepping on property lists,
and other things that the manual usually warns about...)

PSL is *fast*.  There were many unhappy people at AAAI-84, when
the Gabriel benchmarks showed 68K PSL frequently beating out 
Symbolics and LMI.  VAX PSL was about 1-2 orders of magnitude
faster than Franz (depending on the specific benchmark).  PSL's
weakest showing was in floating-point arithmetic, which was
still not too bad.

PSL is *portable*.  We recently did a demo showing PSL running the same
large program on 6 machines - Apollo DN300, Sun, HP 9836, VAX, DEC-20,
and Cray.  IBM, Univac, and other ports are in the works...

PSL is *written in PSL* (about 98-99% to be exact, the remainder being
a little LAP code and some machine-dependent routines in C or Pascal
or whatever).  By contrast, the entire Franz kernel is in C, and
legible only to experienced VAX/C hackers (maybe).  As a result,
improvements in the compiler yields overall gains.  The present compiler
compares well with C compilers, but we're working on a better one...

The PSL distribution *has more tools* (including screen editors
and Common Lisp compatibility packages) than Franz does.

In summary, PSL is a real live production quality Lisp, and
is overall better than Franz for Vaxen (there, now we'll never
get anything from UCB again! :-) )

							stan shebs
							(shebs@utah-orion)