Re: [Gcl-devel] GCL - advice for windows use?

[Mike Thomas]

Hi Jonathan.

>      I hope this is the correct place to post this.

Questions about GCL are always welcome here and answers are provided to
those questions below.

As your underlying need seems to be getting Maxima on Windows, I have also
CC'ed you to the relevant list and provided references to get you started.

>  I have a friend who
> has an interest in Maxima.  The Maxima webpage suggests GCL, so I thought
> I'd start there.  Advice regarding the options to run GCL and/or Maxima
> under windows would be appreciated.  As an alternative to GCL, would you
> suggest CLISP?

I haven't personally used CLISP to build Maxima, but I believe that it is a
tried and true route and is certainly well supported.  The University of
Texas Maxima mailing list is the best way to find out about this:

http://maxima.sourceforge.net/lists.html

You can probably save a lot of hassle by just downloading the latest release
candidate test package of Maxima 5.6, kindly put together for testing by
Dave Billinghurst:

http://www.geocities.com/billingd2002/maxima/

You will find in the archives considerable recent discussion on this
impending release.

>      I attempted to build GCL using the cygwin tools but hit a snag.
> I have cygwin on a Windows 2000 machine as well as cygwin on a Windows XP
> machine.

GCL currently only builds with Mingw32 gcc.  The CVS GCL build is hosted
under MSYS, while the older stable release is built with Cygwin tools (using
the Mingw compiler).  In either case there is a "Readme.mingw" file to tell
you what to do.

>  However, for X windows support (if needed?), I have StarNet.

Not needed - the executable referred to above installs as a normal Windows
package with an experimental TCL GUI interface.

>      Under cygwin the configure program completed nicely.
>
>      The build fails however.  I'll insert only the last few lines
> from the build.
>
> make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/gcl-2.4.3/o'
>
gcc  -fwritable-strings  -DVOL=volatile  -I/usr/src/gcl-2.4.3/o -fsigned-cha
r
> -c
>  -O  -I../gcl-tk -I../h/   unixsave.c
> In file included from /usr/include/stdlib.h:19,
>                  from unexnt.c:52,
>                  from unixsave.c:32:
> /usr/include/alloca.h:14: warning: `alloca' redefined
> ../h/include.h:41: warning: this is the location of the previous
definition
> In file included from unixsave.c:32:
> unexnt.c: In function `allocate_heap':
> unexnt.c:973: invalid lvalue in assignment
> make[1]: *** [unixsave.o] Error 1
> make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/gcl-2.4.3/o'
> make: *** [all] Error 2
> /usr/src/gcl-2.4.3>
>
>      In line 973 of unexnt.c it appears that DBEGIN may not be defined.
> Any advice will be appreciated.

As I'm uncertain where you got your source from I can't comment
specifically, but the configuration currently uses Cygwin as a host for
Mingw32 and this would lead to problems with configuration macros such as
DBEGIN if you tried to build a purely Cygwin build.  A port to Cygwin would
be trivial, but my feeling is that you don't want to go there for now - just
get Maxima and be done with it!

Cheers

Mike Thomas.