Rick> If you have a PC running Linux or FreeBSD, a Sun, or an HP, Rick> you can get CMUCL which has a real compiler and avoids a lot Rick> of the problems that any system trying to piggy back on top Rick> of C will have. Yes, I have CMU-CL installed; there's a Debian GNU/Linux package of it now, and it's the one with the new gengc and mt. It is very fast. Hemlock works, but is very blah by comparison to XEmacs. I wonder how hard it would be to make Hemlock do everything that XEmacs does? :-) A *lot* of work by many people, no doubt. I would like to try and get Garnet to compile sometime... but not until after I've completed some other studies, so I'll be able to fix it if it's broken. The gesture support it's got sounds neat; kind of like what `strokes-mode' does in XEmacs. Rick> I've heard some good things about guile, but it's definitely Rick> more in the Scheme camp than the Common Lisp camp and I Rick> believe that it suffers from RMSism (as compared to scheme) Rick> in the same sorts of ways that FSF's version of GNU Emacs Rick> does (as compared to XEmacs). I'm working on some guile1.3 CVS snapshot Debian packages right now. I've begun to learn how libguile operates. I think it will help me understand XEmacs' internals; `guile' is certainly much simpler and probably easier to understand. You can get it via anon CVS now; check out their CVSROOT/modules file to see what's there. The guile hobbit compiler almost works now. It will compile simple functions and itself to C. I was also able to get the guile-unexec to work, and have packaged it. What is `RMSism'? I will also try and study Scheme48. I think it may be a better engineered product than `guile'... but cannot judge without a lot more study. It's implemented very differently; it looks like the bulk of the code is written in scheme, and compiled to C via the prescheme. I've only spent a total of about 2 hours looking at it, finding that I need to read a few books and theory papers first. Right now I'm part way through a book on garbage collection, and another book on threads... I should kill a few of my threads and concentrate my efforts and time on one project at a time for a while, I think. :-)