RLL and MRS Connection

Gentlemen,

You should soon receive the (outdated) RLL documents you requested,
augmented with miscellaneous MRS documents, for reasons which will 
be clear later.  Providing the actual RLL code is a bit more difficult.

Some background: About two years ago, in the interest of graduating, my
time and energy shifted from playing RLL czar to working on a thesis.
Others, including Dr William Mann and some of his coworkers at USC/ISI,
continued to develop and augment RLL.  For that reason the most up-to-date
version had been at USC-ISIB, on the <MANCOM.RLL> directory.
Unfortunately there is no guarantee that that system is working; the ISI
liason/principle-updater left the project rather abruptly (for personal
reasons) in the middle of a bundle of alterations.  While the "abondoned"
code has been retrieved from its earlier archived status, and is
available, it has been untested.  Let me know if you want access to that
questionable code.

There is a group at Symbolics, including MIT's Phil Agre, who are
developing their own version of RLL in Common Lisp -- called CLRLL I
think.  I don't know whether they plan to release and/or market it, or if
you are still interested...  But if so, that may be an answer...

I am personally coding in MRS these days, and eventually hope to bring up
(all and only) RLL's good features within that system.  As the documents
show, the two systems are fairly similar in theme and capabilities; the
major differences (wrt me) lying in the facts that someone else is
responsible for its adminstrative and technical support, promotion, etc.;
and that MRS, having a larger "constituency", will probably be maintained
(if not for perpetuity at least for a while).

If you would like to actually purchase the current MRS system, send a note
to Juanita Mullen (MULLEN@SUMEX), asking for the licensing agreement.

However, if all of this doesn't dissuade you, do give me a call at (415)
497-1863, and I'll try to help ("... to bring up an implementation", not
"... to further discourage you").



			    Russell Greiner
			    Margaret Jacks Hall
			    Computer Science Department
			    Stanford University
			    Stanford, CA 94305-2085