(Back am I)

Ok, I've been away for CLforJava for a bit. Believe there is something more important than making a Lisp system. We have a GRANDSON!! He's wonderful, cool, cute, and feisty. My wife has been in NYC being a nanny, and I fly up on every other weekend. That schedule (school, flying, baby, house work) didn't leave me much time for coding. About the only place I could was on the plane. And that was slow, but making forward progress. Let's see...

• rewrote the lambda list parser
• fixed a lot of problems with APPLY
• fixed problems with sequences

and one of my students (graduated but still working on the project - what a guy!)

• has about 2/3 of the std tests working
• of those, we have about 85% working
• wrote FORMAT - some compiler problems found in that

We did come upon something we did not expect. One of my students was working on SORT. The approach was to use the sort in the Java library. As a design, it was rather simple (we had to teach it to use Lisp functions - but that's what CLforJava is good at). After getting out a few bugs, we were ready to try it out. We built it, and when the Java compiler came at the SORT, it crashed. It didn't complain, it actually crashed! That something not expected. We filed a serious bug - SORT is waiting...

For the last few weeks, I've been making a new compiler entirely in Lisp. Most of the new environment is done - which will make handling code MUCH easier. And I'm well into a semantic analyzer that will know how to handle all of the special operations. My goal is to have the SA working by school starts up in August.

The next big thing is building the structural analysis (a la Muchnick) module. The old compiler was pretty stupid. I expect that, having a "real" compiler, CLforJava will run with at least a quarter of the code and a speed-up of a factor 3 or 4. Thoughts that anyone has, please send them over.

Oh, yes. Sorry to the NYC Lisp Group - missed the flyer about of the gathering at Randall's island. I'm still going up, and I'd like to meet you folks!

As the last, I just have to let you see why the grandson is just wonderful!!

Jerry