Aria Lisp Development System tapes

[Herb Jellinek]

Arun Welch kindly donated a set of Venue-era backup tapes to Interlisp.org.  Almost two years later, our data recovery people have sent us the contents of two of the tapes.

The tapes contain the code and documentation for a non-Medley Lisp system called Aria.  The code is in the Tape4 directory, the docs in Tape5.

Find them here on the Interlisp.org Google Drive.  The Tape 4 README begins

           ================================
           The Aria Lisp Development System
           ================================
                  
               Beta README File
              February 23, 1990


This is the README file in the top-level directory of the Aria
distribution.  This file contains:
    o Mailing addresses
    o Description of the Aria organization of Aria source files
    o Updates to published documentation.

For complete instructions on how to install Aria, read "The Aria
Installation Guide" which accompanies this release.

@Arun, can you add context?

Have fun exploring.

            Herb

[Arun Welch]

Happy to provide context. Aria was a project at Envos to bring the productivity of Interlisp to Common Lisp. Not necessarily a port of the tools to Interlisp but a re-implementation. My understanding is that it was primarily funded by Fuji Xerox, but I could be wrong on that. It used Franz Common Lisp as the underlying language implementation, PCL/CLOS as the object system, CLIM layered on Andrew as the UI. If you look in the dev-env directory you’ll see a lot of the same concepts (grapher, code analysis, structure editor, etc). The migration tool was pretty cool, it converted Interlisp code to CL.

Unfortunately it looks like the Postscript manual pages aren’t on the tape, which is a bit of a bummer. The documentation was written in a typesetting format (think of TeX/LaTeX//Scribe) and requires the typesetter to convert to PS.

When Envos folded all the Medley stuff moved to Venue and the Aria project lived on just long enough to release the minimum requirements as the Beta release to fulfill the contract requirements.

IMHO, the project was hampered by the fact that CLIM was very immature and mired in a lot of political problems, Franz didn’t see the point in it since they figured their native Emacs/CLI tools were sufficient to the task, CLOS was still PCL, Andrew didn’t have high adoption outside of CMU.

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[Paolo Amoroso]

I assume Aria was based on CLIM 1.x, right?

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Paolo Amoroso | Blog | Mastodon

[Arun Welch]

Haha, no.

;;; CLIM 0.9 Release
;;; Freeze for ARIA Beta

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