zia

...now on my laptop...

Friday, 2003-9-12

Bleeding from the edges

I had this idea a few weeks ago to compare and contrast LISP's macro facilities with the ocamlp4 preprocessor. I tried an OpenMCL binary on my Mac OS X, and it "just works".
Then I tried to find a free LISP for Windows. There are a couple of incomplete commercial versions, and there's CLISP. The latter seemed to require libncurses, which didn't exist on my cygwin installation. I tried to tell the cygwin setup application to install only a new version of libncurses, but it decided that it had to download several megabytes of packages, and in the process it broke my zsh and still didn't get a libncurses. Turns out that on cygwin, libraries don't go in /lib or /usr/lib if they're shared (.dll) libraries; instead, they go in /bin and they don't get "lib*" names (like "libncurses.*"), but instead get /bin/cyg* names (cygncurses*.dll), with version numbers following (cygncurses[567].dll). Presumably this is because of incompatible APIs. Bizarre.
Bottom line, I'll have to ask around (both the cygwin and CLisp mailing lists) before I'll be able to repair my cygwin install.

To add insult, I upgraded to Python2.3 and so my bzero stopped working as well (until I changed my script around to reference Python2.2.2 explicitly). I guess it's time to upgrade my bzero, too.

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