lispcommon-lispmcl

How can I run an algorithm written for Digitool 4.3 (2003)?

I work on computational music. I have found the ps13 pitch spelling algorithm implemented in Lisp in 2003, precisely "Digitool MCL 4.3". I would like to run this code, preferably on a Linux x86 machine, to compare its results with other similar codes.

I am new to Lisp, but so far my research led me to think that Digitool MCL is no longer available. I thought of two ways which may help me:

I have not succeeded in finding one of these two options, nor running it directly with sbcl (but, as a newbie, I may have missed a small modification to make it run easily).

May someone help me?

Solution

  • Summary

    This code is very close to being portable CL: you won't need something emulating an antique Mac to run it. I ran it on three implementations (SBCL, LispWorks, CCL) within a few minutes. However if you're not a Lisp person (and don't want to become one) it will be somewhat more fiddly to do that.

    However I can't just send you a fixed version, both because this isn't the right forum for that, and also because we'd need to get the author's permission to do so. I have asked him if he would be interested in a portabalised version, and if he is, I will send him one in due course. You could also get in touch and ask to be notified.

    (Meta-summary: while I think the question is fine, any reasonable answer probably doesn't fit on SO.)

    Details

    One initial problem with this code is that the file uses old Mac line end conventions (I think: not Unix anyway): unless whatever Lisp you're using is smart enough to spot this (some are, SBCL seems not to be although I am sure there are options to tell it) you'll need to convert it.

    Given that, the code that implements this algorithm is very, very close to being portable Common Lisp. It has four dependencies on non-standard things:

    The global variables can probably be safely commented out as I think they are just controls for the compiler, probably. The functions have fairly obvious specifications: they're obviously meant to pop up file / directory choosers.

    However you can just not use the bits of the code that use these functions, so you can compile it, get a few compiler warnings about undefined functions, and then it's fine.

    But it gets better than that in fact: the latter-day descendant of MCL is Clozure CL: CCL is free, and open source. CCL has both choose-file-dialog and choose-directory-dialog already and both of the globals exist although one is no longer exported.

    Unfortunately there are then some hidden portability problems to do with assumptions about what pathnames look like as strings: it's making some assumption about what things looked like on pre-OSX Macs I think. This kind of problem is easy but often a bit fiddly to fix (I think in this case it would be easy). So, again, the answer to that is just not call the things that are doing a lot of pathname munging:

    > (ps13-test-from-file-list (directory "~/Downloads/d/*.opnd"))

[... much output ...]

Total number of errors = 81.
Total number of notes = 41544.
Percentage correct = 99.81%

nil

    Note that the above output came from LispWorks, not CCL: CCL works just as well though, as will any CL probably.

    SBCL has one additional problem: the CL-USER package in SBCL already uses a package which exports int which is defined in this code. So you need to compile it in some other package. But given that, it's fine in SBCL as well.