Axisp is an experimental branch of Axiom. The focus of development is to rewrite the original Boot implementation into Common Lisp, and to improve and document the compiler and interpreter in the process. Stephen Wilson is the principle maintainer.

There are two macroscopic stages involved:

• Semantic translation: Converting from Boot to Lisp is not hard. The intention is that `connected components' of the system will be converted into Lisp and documented.
• Design translation: Converting from Boot to Lisp is not pretty. Once a `connected component' has been resolved, translated, and documented, options for redesign will be considered.

AXISP IS AN EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH. Some sub-branches of Axisp are intended to be stable, others, er, not so much. See the Repo Overview below.

Getting the Axisp Branch

Axisp is available through a public Git repository on axiom-developer.org. If you have an account on axiom-developer, simply invoke:

     git-clone ssh://<your-login>@axiom-developer.org/~swilson/axisp

Alternatively, the user `git' can be used as a guest login with password `linus'.

The above will give you a copy of the Axisp source tree rooted under the directory `axisp'.

Building Axisp

Assuming the source tree is under $AXISP, do:

    <img alt="LatexWiki Image" class="equation" src="images/7969001532889197381-18.0px.png" width="16" height="12"/>AXISP
    $ export AXIOM=`pwd`/mnt/linux
    <img alt="LatexWiki Image" class="equation" src="images/1341406260558842453-18.0px.png" width="122" height="16"/>PATH:$AXIOM/bin
    $ make

Repo Overview

After doing a git-clone, your repository should have the following remote branches:

• origin/axisp :

  Staging ground for highly experimental code eventually looking for promotion into master. Here, all bets are off.

• origin/master :

  This is the stable axisp branch.

• origin/axisp-silver-test :

  Staging ground for code looking for public review and promotion into axisp-silver-release.

• origin/axisp-silver-release :

  Stable, tested code with changes intended to be pulled by Tim upstream into Silver. This branch should almost always be a pristine image of Silver.

Roughly speaking, code filters down through the above chain of branches. Certain changes (for example fixing Boot bugs or documenting Boot code which resulted as a byproduct of the Lisp rewrite), are redundant to the master and axisp branches. These types of changes go directly into axisp-silver-test or, if the change is trivial, into axisp-silver-release.

Collaborative Development

If you wish to work with or study the current tip of development, and you have cloned from the Axisp repo, let Git know you wish to track the origin/axisp branch. Issue:

       git-branch --track axisp origin/axisp

This will create a new local branch named axisp which is setup to follow the tip of development. With that in place, you can say:

       git-checkout axisp
       git-pull

This will change the current working branch to axisp and merge locally any upstream changes.

Developers can locally modify such a tracking branch and publish it somewhere on the net, and send me a git-pull request when ready to share a changeset. Traditional patch-sets (diff -Naur's) are also welcome.

New Features and Tools

• AxWeb : A literate programming tool written in Common Lisp