Mac Common Lisp (MCL) was in danger of extinction, but seems to be secure for now. Apple has licensed its development software to Digitool, Inc., which will introduce a native PowerPC MCL next year. Digitool will also support 680x0 versions, which Apple will sell through APDA. The new company consists of former Apple MCL developers and the principals of Paradigm Software, Inc. Corporate sponsors include Flavors Technology, Inc.; KyTek, Inc.; Lissys Ltd.; and UBasel. hsayed@digitool.com or digitool@ applelink.com, 675 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139; 617-441-5000, 617-576-7680 Fax. [PR Newswire, 11/10/93. Chuck Morefield (goldtec@cerf.net), 11/23/94.]

Harlequin (Cambridge, MA) has acquired Lucid's Lisp business, and will support Lucid Common Lisp. Jon L. White is now a member of Harlequin's Menlo Park team. PC-based FreeLisp from Harlequin resembles LispWorks, but with no compiler -- available to universities only, for a nominal charge for shipping and documentation. Imogen Holbrook (imogen@harlequin.com), Harlequin Inc., 1 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142; (617) 374-2401, (617) 252-6505 Fax. [Eric P. Husgen (husgen@harlequin.com), comp.windows.garnet, 11/29/94.]

Richard Stallman will use a Scheme variant as the basic extension language for Emacs and the GNU projects. This will be used to implement versions of Rush/Tcl, Python, Emacs Lisp, and C. "Rush is a cleaned-up Tcl that runs far faster in Scheme emulation than Tcl itself." The Scheme variant will have case-sensitive symbol names; #false identical to (); extra symbol slots for translating Lisp to Scheme; fast exception handling, catch, and throw; multiple obarrays; flexible string functions; access to Unix system calls; forking pipelines, redirections, etc.; C callouts for strings and for arbitrary data; dynamic variables compatible with C variables; application-defined Scheme data types; interactive argument-reading slots in functions; etc. Contact Tom Lord if you can contribute substantial effort. [lord@gnu.ai.mit.edu, gnu.announce, 10/19/94. David Joslin.]

Robin Rowe's recent survey on safety-critical systems found Ada to be the most popular language by far, with assembler second. The Ada Information Clearinghouse offers a 213KB descriptive listing of 722 Ada projects. (Contact adainfo@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu for FTP instructions.) [cpp@netcom.com, comp.lang.c++, 11/13/94.]