[r-t] Proving software for a Mac?

[Don Morrison]

On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 3:44 PM, Alex Tatlow <alextatlow at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Is there any proving software (ie, Sirilic) that will work on a Mac? I ask as I have a Mac and my windows PC is on its way out, and I shan't be able to replace it any time soon.
> Thanks.AWT.

Assuming your Macintosh is no more than six years old or so, and thus
has an Intel processor, there are a variety of virtualization packages
available for it. Some are commercial, but others are free. I use the
free VirtualBox. Of course, unless you have some illicit source, you
still have to pay for the Windows licence for the OS you run inside
it.

I've never used it seriously, but I believe David Hull made available
on the web a bit of proving software that runs on his server. I
presume it should work under any sensible browser on any platform. I
don't know whether or not it's still available, but it's possibly
worth going and having a look for.

Apart from sometimes using Philip Saddleton's SPAFT, I don't do any
proving under Windows, instead doing all my proving just on my
Macintosh, using one of two different glumps of software I've written
myself. One is in Java; and the other in Common LISP, which I usually
run under the free CLISP implementation. Both are undocumented,
unsupported, unpolished, and not ready for public consumption. Though
between them they've been used to prove and format thousands (who was
that groaning?) of compositions currently on display on the web.
Albeit, not always under Macintosh; while that's what I use close to
exclusively these days, at times in the past I've also used both on
Linux and on Windows.

For what seems like an eternity, on my ever expanding, leagues long
to-do list has been tidying this stuff up, finishing and polishing it,
and making it readily available to others. Each year the expected time
until I get around to being able to do that seems to increase, though.

However, if you'd like a copy of either or both in their current,
crude, unfinished state, I'd be more than happy to send them to you.
Just let me know if you feel up to fighting with it.



-- 
Don Morrison <dfm at ringing.org>
"Although Dewey's book is incredibly ill written, it seemed to me...to
have a feeling of intimacy with the universe that I found unequaled.
So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but
keenly desirous to tell you how it was."
  -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, letter to Frederick Pollock, 15 May 1931