Simon,

At that point I am very lost, and if you have any idea of what I could
do I will really appreciate your help.

My problem is still how to run lisp within xemacs. 

With the acl5 distribution come several *.el files.  Some of them
must be loaded in order to set the Emacs-Lisp Interface,
as well as the form fi:common-lisp

Well, one of the "important" file must be the fi-site-init.el file.

Its very first line says
(requires 'cl)
which means, if I am right, that a lisp image is required.  But so far
I do not have a lisp image.  Let me go on with the *.el files for the
moment.

When loading from a scratch buffer the fi-site-init file, the local
buffer message is
Invalid read syntax: "#"
But never mind, let's go on.

Now I would like to test if the Emacs-Lisp Interface is ok.  For that
I need the form fi:verify-emacs-support which is in
/usr/local/acl5/eli/fi-utils.el.

After loading the file and evaluating the form I get the message
everything looks fine!
That I still dont believe.

The fi:common-lisp form is in the /usr/local/acl5/eli/fi-subproc.el file.

Here I must admit that I did not succeed to automize these loading
operations
in the .emacs file.  For a reason I don't understand I must do by hand in a
scratch
buffer, or with the M-x load-file command.  It is really not clear what I
am doing
wrong ...

I still not have evaluate the fi:common-lisp form, because I would like to 
understand first what is going on with the lisp image.  Is the following
right?

The lisp image is like a set of environment variables that will persist
from one lisp
sessionto the other, and the lisp executable may read it to set the
variables as they
where the previous time?

To create a lisp image it is quite simple, just type at a the lisp prompt 
user(1): (excl:dumplisp :name "/home/bin/cl")

But running the following script (inspired from the manual guide)
#! /bin/bash
ALLEGRO_CL_HOME=/usr/local/acl5
export ALLEGRO_CL_HOME
/home/bin/cl <" at "$>
gives the error message 
/home/bin/cl: cannot execute binary file

(chmod +x cl has been done)

Well, the main questions are

1) How to set correctly the Emacs-Lisp Interface, and the fi:common-lisp
form?

2) Does a lisp image is required in any case, and particularly before the
(require 'cl) line of the fi-site-init.el file?

3) What is the use of the above script if after all the lisp is expected to
be
ran as a subprocess of xemacs?


As you see I am quite desesparate, and if you could bring me some muscles,
ideas
or hopes, it would be very nice of you.


thank you for your patience.
Antoine.