Hello,

I am new to PowerLoom, though I have read most everything I can find about it.  My background is in computer science; I am working in the area of interactive story construction. I have used Prolog for years, and my initial impression is that PowerLoom is more capable for language-oriented work.   I am looking for any sort of more substantial applications written with PowerLoom, that I might study in order to get a better handle on how to do application development using PowerLoom in a Lisp environment.

Thanks,

Kyle Pierce

I am trying to find an inexpensive way to run PowerLoom on my Windows PC.  I guess I really ought to do a Linux installation and run CMU CL, but that seems like a lot of trouble right now.  I'm learning to use GNU Common Lisp but when I try to start PowerLoom, I run into problems.  Has anyone succeeded in using GNU Common Lisp with PowerLoom?  If so, what version of GCL?  Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Kyle

I should clarify what I asked earlier about using GNU CL to run PowerLoom.  I am trying to find a workable Lisp environment for interactive development using Stella.  I have a Windows XP system but I often use XEmacs and I'm sure I can get a GNU CL process running from there.  Then I just need to get PowerLoom working with GNU CL, or rather, vice versa.  This seems to be a formidable task, though.  I can easily run the Java version in a console, but the editing features are of course almost nonexistent.

I would no doubt choose Java as the language for any final implementation, but I want to take advantage of the Lisp environment if I can, for its interactive features.  If, however, there might be better choices for someone who is only moderately familiar with Common Lisp as a development environment, let me know.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Kyle Pierce

Thank you both, this is very interesting news.  In the meantime, I am looking into the possibilities for a more interactive Java-based solution.

Kyle

-------------- Original message from Andre Valente : --------------

>
> Andras Simon wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Andre Valente wrote:
> >
> >> What I am doing (and may be yoru best bet for the moment) is to get a
> >> Linux machine and install CMUCL. Several people begged the CMLCL team
> >> to port it to Cygwin but they just said no.
> >
> >
> > Understandably. But see
> > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.cmucl.devel/6399
>
> This is great (and very recent) news! I look forward to being able to use CMU
> CL in Windows... It shodul be much easier to make the necessary changes (if
> any) to STELLA.
>
> Thanks for the hint,
> Andre

I am exploring various options for getting up and running with Stella & PowerLoom.  I don't ask much of a usable interactive facility, and am satisfied just to be able to pop up a REPL (read-eval-print loop) window if nothing else.  This is enough to give a great deal of access to the internal state of an application.  So all of the CL features are wonderful, but at the moment I can't devote a lot of time to getting up and running with Stella & PowerLoom in a Linux environment.

Has anyone tried writing a simple facility of this sort for the Java version of Stella?  Since Stella does have some debug/trace capabilities of its own (the goal/subgoal-trace feature, at least), should it not be pretty straightforward to include these features in a Java-only implementation, rather than relying on the underlying Lisp environment for that purpose?

Please share any thoughts along these lines...

Kyle