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Monday, January 18, 2010

AutoLISP differences between AutoCAD and Bricscad

2010/07/12:
CHANGED: comments on differences
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This should have been a section showing "all the little differences in behavior" of Bricscad's AutoLISP compared to AutoCAD's. Thus it should have been a helping aid for any AutoLISP programmers working in both worlds. However, especially in the last few months and years Bricscad has improved it's AutoLISP engine so much that at the moment I could not find any real differences anymore, neither with the "standard" AutoLISP nor with the ActiveX-commands.

With "pure" AutoLISP the only issue I could find so far are some ACET-functions, that do not seem to work (i.e. "acet-sys-command"). Besides the "pure" AutoLISP some "normal" Bricscad-command names/options and the behaviour of these also differ in some details (as Martin also wrote in his comment below). Therefore, if your code heavily depends on "normal" commands using "(command ...)" or "(vl-cmdf ...)" then you will probably run into the one or the other error that needs to be changed.

If somebody here stumbles across any other differences, please let the other readers know. (And let also Bricsys know. They are very eager to correct such asap.)

On the other hand, Bricscad supports some AutoLISP functions that you do not find in AutoCAD. These are documented in the online Bricscad DevRef.

Also Bricscad's AutoLISP engine is much faster than the one AutoCAD is using. (See i.e. this post in the Bricscad-forum.)

Another word about 3rd party AutoLISP-"additions", if you want to call it that way. I specifically mean DOSLib and OpenDCL although others may be added in the future. Both are also available for Bricscad since V9, however, the Bricscad support of OpenDCL so far only is available as an "unstable" version (2010/01/19). The stable release of OpenDCL 6 seems to be coming soon though.