reduce-algebra/bin

The Reduce "bin" directory
==========================


The files in this directory are intended to provide an easy way to launch
Reduce. From the Reduce "trunk" you can just issue a command such as
bin/redpsl
or bin/redcsl
to use the PSL or CSL version of Reduce (supposing that you have configured
and built it!).

There are some features of the scripts used here that may not at first seem
obvious, and so I will try to explain here what these features are trying
to achieve.

The first thing is that each script here can be invoked from anywhere - the
directory that is current when you trigger one of these scripts does not
matter. So, for instance, you can put this directory on your PATH and then use
Reduce freely. This remark may seem obvious, but the important aspect of it
is that these scripts identify directories where various Reduce resources are
to be found, and contain curious-looking code to do this. However you should
not copy any of these scripts and place them in a directory other than here
since they rely on paths relative to the place where they themselves live.

The second matter is that some people in some contexts have a single shared
file-space that they access from a variety of different models of computer.
The binaries that relate to different operating systems and computer
architectures have to be kept separate, and the main configure and build
scripts for Reduce achieve this by building binaries in sub-directories
with name such as pslbuild/i686-pc-windows or cslbuild/x84_64-unknown-suse11.1.
The scripts here automatically detect the nature on the machine that they are
being run on and on that basis link through and launch the relevant version
of the code.

The file .../trunk/scripts/resetall.sh can be used to restore all these
scripts to their original state.

The programs provided for at present are

redcsl Reduce using the CSL Lisp system. Note that just calling
redcsl will probably cause a window to pop up, but
"redcsl -w" causes the code to run as a console application.
redpsl Reduce using the PSL Lisp system.

The following may be of use of CSL developers but are not intended to be
of general use to people who are not suffering problems or debugging new code:

bootstrapreduce A slower CSL version that is used while building the
full version, and where the function "lisp mapstore()" may
be used to collect profiling information.
csl The CSL Lisp system.

There may be other scripts as well!

At present for the CSL versions there is one further complication. If an
exact match for your operating system can not be found in the set of installed
binaries then the first available "soft match" will be tried, with a message
displayed to explain. There is no clever arrangement to cause near matches
to be tested for in a special order. The idea behind this is so that eg if
you had binaries for say fedora 9 installed and were actually running a
different version of fedora (say 10) then the code will TRY the fedora 9
binary. This fall-back arrangement is not guaranteed to work, and in case
of uncertainty please configure and rebuild everything for your current
computer.


Arthur Norman. 2009-2015