Beginner needs help!

[areece@merle.acns.nwu.edu]

Sorry for the poor formatting - I trust everybody remembers who said what.

>2. Is it possible to call a DOS shell from within stella/clisp? If
> so could it run csound, or would there be memory problems?

>. . . You will be able  
>to invoke csound, but I don't have any idea about memory limitations.  

csound would probably run in the generic DOS shell, but I wouldn't recommend
it.  Calling command.com from clisp will not, in all likelihood, allow access
to extended memory.  In fact, it will probably have to share low memory with
clisp, and so it would run VERY slowly (lots of disk caching).  Exit clisp
first - it wastes enough time as it is.

>Also, my guess is that in DOS I the csound shell will have to finish  
>before clisp resumes.

If you are lucky enough to be running Novell DOS 7, you could call another
shell and run csound there.  Otherwise, this is true, so you may as well exit 
clisp.

>3. When I type quit from stella I get placed at '>' prompt. Whatever
>I then type seems to put me in the debugger Break-1 >. How do you

>To quit CLISP use the (exit) function.  

No such luck.  This doesn't work in clisp/dos.  My uneducated guess is that
clisp doesn't like the fact that Stella is exited (excited?) by typing "exit."
The actual error says that EXIT is not a defined function.  Go figure.  I will
try disabling stella's EXIT function next time I compile her, and see what
happens in this arena.

>Control-D also works in Unix,   
>try Control-Z on DOS.

Control-Z works ok in DOS; at first glance, it appears to exit fairly
gracefully - all files properly closed, memory cleared, etc.  Not that I have
_any_ clue about lisp's file-handling protocols!	

By the way, I downloaded cm.zip about 4 days ago (from zkm, not stanford) and
it compiled in clisp ok, no errors, but tons o' warnings.  Rick-I will send
you the warnings I got, but the phone lines are really awful here right now,
and it's a decent-sized file, so uploading will have to wait for now.  Also by
the way, csound.lsp compiled fine this time, but when I tried to output to
.sco, I got a bunch of garbage.  It looks like binary data - umm, it isn't
_supposed_ to do this, is it?  Midi-file output works fine, though.

Regards,
-Aaron (areece@merle.acns.nwu.edu)