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ICAD Lisp to Autodesk Visual Lisp

4 REPLIES 4
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Message 1 of 5
petetown
1168 Views, 4 Replies

ICAD Lisp to Autodesk Visual Lisp

Hi,

Excuse my lack of knowledge on this subject. I'm after some guidance. We have a very old application at our company that is used to generate a BOM(Bill of materials) based on the sizes of a construction post survey. It uses an application called ICAD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICAD_%28software%29

ICAD is very old and it's nearly impossible to find anyone who knows anything about it. We'd like to move off of ICAD, but we don't want to start from scratch recoding all of our LISP data into a new System. Is there any way of migrating the LISP into a new tool, like Autodesk?

 

Many thanks,

 

Pete

 

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4 REPLIES 4
Message 2 of 5
stevor
in reply to: petetown

Right out of the history books; and supports John Walker's reason for using a LISP as the customization language. First, what is the 'construction post survey' data format? And what OS do you use to 'run' the application? Then, as your Wiki article notes, the dozens of old LISP systems are largely gone. So, most likely, you will adapt some of the many BOM routines of the [free] autolisp world to do the same job. Especially if the data is starts in the DWG files. Even if the initial data is text, the process can be inside Autocad, or some lisp enabled CAD program..
S
Message 3 of 5
DavidBethel
in reply to: petetown

If ICAD was IntelliCAD, then you should have very few problems.  I don't believe that they ever implemented any vl functions, just basic AutoLISP  -David

Message 4 of 5
TapioKarras
in reply to: petetown

You should take a look of Design++ from Design Parametrics (DPI) at http://www.dp.com . It's an actively developed knowledge-based engineering (KBE) platform with 20-year history of supporting high-value design automation and product configuration applications. Design++ is also the foundation for a commercial end-user product for conceptual plant design: Bentley PlantWise.

 

Design++ runs on the same Franz Allegro Common Lisp as ICAD did making the port of your application much easier. Design++ supports also the same KBE concepts further facilitating the port compared to porting to a vanilla Lisp environment. Design++ integrates with AutoCAD through a dynamic online link allowing it to both drive geometry generation and receive input from AutoCAD.

 

You can contact DPI directly at info@dp.com for further details.

 

- Tapio

Message 5 of 5
martti.halminen
in reply to: petetown


@petetown wrote:

Hi,

Excuse my lack of knowledge on this subject. I'm after some guidance. We have a very old application at our company that is used to generate a BOM(Bill of materials) based on the sizes of a construction post survey. It uses an application called ICAD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICAD_%28software%29

ICAD is very old and it's nearly impossible to find anyone who knows anything about it. We'd like to move off of ICAD, but we don't want to start from scratch recoding all of our LISP data into a new System. Is there any way of migrating the LISP into a new tool, like Autodesk?

  


The problem with ICAD is that it is a large application written on top of Common Lisp, which is a far more powerful language then AutoCAD's Visual Lisp. So it is built using techniques impossible to implement in AutoCAD native environment.

Re-building the functionality on top of bare Common Lisp would be possible, but a non-trivial task.

Easiest would be building on top of some CL-based existing tool, Design++ would be one possibility.

 

Another worth investigating is Genworks GDL

http://www.genworks.com

- Dave Cooper at Genworks has a heavy ICAD background, so he could be a quite useful consult on your problems.

 

--

 

 

 

 

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