[Openmcl-devel] Using OpenMCL as a shell scripting interpreter

[Stonewall Ballard]

I haven't had much time to work on this, so I'd appreciate any help I 
can get.

Aside from replicating some of my Python utility scripts in Lisp to see 
whether I feel comfortable with using it that way, my other problem is 
how to coerce openmcl to run from a simple text file. I'm not going to 
make a megabyte image for every script - I need to keep them as text 
until they're run, just like other shell languages.

I've tried invoking openmcl with a #! first line in a file, and while 
openmcl apparently runs, it doesn't go anywhere. I would have thought 
that:

#!/usr/local/bin/openmcl -V

would print the version number, but I can't find the output anywhere. 
This works with Python, so I assume that I just need to spend time 
understanding how openmcl starts up. The code that handles the -V 
argument just does this (in process-application-arguments):

(progn
   (format t "~&~a~&" (application-version-string a))
   (force-output t)
   (#_exit 0))

If I can't get this to show up on the terminal, it's going to be rather 
hard to debug.

Any ideas?

The next task is to get openmcl to load stdin.

  - Stoney


On Mar 27, 2004, at 4:31 PM, Gary King wrote:

> By the way, I'm also interested in a tool of this sort so if you want 
> a hand, I'd be happy to try and contribute...
>
> On Mar 26, 2004, at 11:25 PM, Stonewall Ballard wrote:
>
>> Very interesting. I hadn't see this before. Thanks for the pointer.
>>
>>   - Stoney
>>
>> On Mar 26, 2004, at 7:40 PM, Gary King wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> You're probably aware of Olin Shivers work with the Scheme shell, 
>>> but just in case you're not, 
>>> http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/shivers94scheme.html is a good 
>>> introduction. I really like the idea of a nice Lisp shell built 
>>> around OpenMCL.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Gary
>>>