Installing OpenMCL on Mac OS X

A simple recipe for installing OpenMCL on OS X.

These instructions are intended to get you up and running with OpenMCL as quickly as possible on OS X. They are no substitute for reading the OpenMCL Documentation.

  1. Retrieve the latest release.
  2. Open Terminal (it's in /Applications/Utilities/)
  3. Choose a parent directory for the archive, eg /usr/local/ or ~/Lisp/
  4. cd to the parent directory and unpack the archive with tar:
    tar xvfz /path/to/openmcl-darwin-ver.tar.gz
  5. Copy ccl/scripts/openmcl to a directory in your $PATH, eg /usr/local/bin/
  6. Edit the copied openmcl shell script (see below)
  7. You should be able to run OpenMCL by simply typing openmcl at your shell prompt

You need to tell OpenMCL where you installed it. This can be done in one of two ways. In your ~/.profile you can set CCL_DEFAULT_DIRECTORY to point to the installed location. Example for bash: 

export CCL_DEFAULT_DIRECTORY=/usr/local/ccl

My preference is to edit the openmcl script: 

if [ -z "$CCL_DEFAULT_DIRECTORY" ]; then
    CCL_DEFAULT_DIRECTORY=/usr/local/ccl
fi

It is essential that you do this or openmcl will not work. The reason I prefer to edit the openmcl script is because I usually run OpenMCL from Carbon Emacs? in a SLIME session. It's simpler to have CCL_DEFAULT_DIRECTORY set in just one place.

OpenMCL is also available from the following sources:

I have a more comprehensive page describing my Lisp setup on OS X. The previous editor of this page said that the above instructions will also work on Linux/PPC. I have not tested this, but the documentation for OpenMCL at clozure.com covers all that.

Common Lisp implementation

Getting Started

This page is linked from: Getting Started  

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