On Sun, 29 Feb 2004, Mario Storti wrote:

> I'm now looking for an extension language to this
> program. I have several alternatives and Lisp is
> one of them. 

As you need something lightweight, you should have a look at Marc Feely's 
Gambit (if you can live with the license). It has an especially nice 
c-call interface that also supports calling scheme from C well.

Bruno Haible's CLISP is also quite a lightweight interpreter system, but I 
must say I never used its FFI.

GCL would work, but I do not recommend that anymore. It's just too 
primitive.

CMUCL is, well, rather a full-blown OS than a small system suitable for 
scripting extensions.

> I have seen that CMUCL has an alien package that
> does it. However I have read elsewhere in the
> documentation that the heap size for alien
> variables is bounded to 8MB.

I do not think this still is up-to-date.

> Also, I read that
> it's not easy to call Lisp code from C.

It works, but admittedly is " a bit hackish", as the docs say. I can give 
you some simple examples.

> The idea is that the user of the FEM program
> should call C/C++ routines from a library, to
> build basically distributed vectors, matrices,
> perhaps graphs, and operate on them. This
> entities are very large, matrices may have
> storage areas with several hundreds MB per
> computing node. And when iterative methods are
> used, several hundred vectors are created, each
> is several MB's large (per node). 

Oh, by the way, did you have a look at SWIG?

-- 
regards,               [EMAIL PROTECTED]                 (o_
Dr. Thomas Fischbacher -  http://www.cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~tf  //\
(lambda (n) ((lambda (p q r) (p p q r)) (lambda (g x y)              V_/_
(if (= x 0) y (g g (- x 1) (* x y)))) n 1))                     (Debian GNU)

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