[CM] which lisp/scheme for future use?

[Orm Finnendahl]

Hi Rick, Bill et.all,

I'm teaching Common Music and Lisp at the Folkwang in Essen. Recently
we got rid of all SGIs and most Macs in favor of Linux based PCs and
I'm wondering about which LISP system to install in the long run. We
didn't transfer our ACL subscription from the SGIs to the PCs since we
would prefer to install something our students can also use on their
own PCs at home (ACL is quite expensive and the free version doesn't
really work sufficiently). Privately I'm using clisp but it seems that
you're not very happy with it due to the lack of a proper foreign
function interface. I don't mind to switch to something else and even
start teaching scheme instead of CLTL. I gave CMUcl a try yesterday
but got tons of errors trying to compile the lisp image (after 11000
lines of output).

Rick and Bill, could you give me your five cents on that subject
matter? I'd like Essen to be somewhat synchronous with the
development. And although it seems to me that Rick is mainly using
Macintoshes and Bill seems to favor ACL there should be an alternative
on the Linux Platform. What about guile?

I would participate in trying to make a joint effort to establish some
documentation for a Unix based setup including emacs and some
interpreter. I didn't look into the Planet CCRMA distro that much as
I'm using Debian and in Essen they use SUSE but maybe it could somehow
be part of that?

It would be great if some distant day from now the whole procedure of
getting Common (Lisp) Music and friends to work (including Realtime,
Plotter and MIDI) is as simple on the Linux Platform as it is on the
Mac right now.

Yours,
Orm