From: ·······@my-deja.com
Subject: ITTA Lisp User Survey
Date: 
Message-ID: <8r06di$it7$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
Our company, International Technology & Trade Associates (ITTA) Inc., is
currently conducting a independent survey of lisp users.  This Lisp
user survey is being conducted in an effort to explore the potential of
Lisp programming in numerous research and product development fields.
Ultimately, we would like to promote wider Lisp language use in
numerous sectors and research fields.  Oursurvey is designed to assist
in identifying lisp language strengths and commonly perceived
weaknesses.

We would be happy to share our findings with participants when the
survey is complete.  Please check both our survey page at
www.itta.com/lisp.htm and our main page at www.itta.com.

Douglas Ramsey
Analyst
ITTA Inc.


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

From: Marco Antoniotti
Subject: Re: ITTA Lisp User Survey
Date: 
Message-ID: <y6cg0mjw7p3.fsf@octagon.mrl.nyu.edu>
·······@my-deja.com writes:

> Our company, International Technology & Trade Associates (ITTA) Inc., is
> currently conducting a independent survey of lisp users.  This Lisp
> user survey is being conducted in an effort to explore the potential of
> Lisp programming in numerous research and product development fields.
> Ultimately, we would like to promote wider Lisp language use in
> numerous sectors and research fields.  Oursurvey is designed to assist
> in identifying lisp language strengths and commonly perceived
> weaknesses.
> 
> We would be happy to share our findings with participants when the
> survey is complete.  Please check both our survey page at
> www.itta.com/lisp.htm and our main page at www.itta.com.
> 
> Douglas Ramsey
> Analyst
> ITTA Inc.


Hi

I answered the survey.  This is my personal agenda, but I urge
everybody who will want to respond, to answer the question about the
"shortcoming of (Common) Lisp" with a note about the "lack of
non-proprietary standards beyond ANSI (GUI, FFI, Unicode/UTF, etc)".

A case in point.  Franz is putting up for grabs a set of XML utilities
(hey, they are even LGPL'd).  Unfortunately these utilities seem to
work *only* on ACL.  One of the main problems seems to be Unicode/UTF
encoding.  Bruno Haible's CLisp has had Unicode support for quite some
time.  LispWorks too.  ACL is setting up Unicode support now.

How are these implementations of the standard related?

Sooner or later Unicode support may make it into CMUCL and SBCL.  How
should it be specified/implemented in these cases?

Cheers

-- 
Marco Antoniotti =============================================================
NYU Bioinformatics Group			 tel. +1 - 212 - 998 3488
719 Broadway 12th Floor                          fax  +1 - 212 - 995 4122
New York, NY 10003, USA				 http://galt.mrl.nyu.edu/valis
             Like DNA, such a language [Lisp] does not go out of style.
			      Paul Graham, ANSI Common Lisp
From: Rainer Joswig
Subject: Re: ITTA Lisp User Survey
Date: 
Message-ID: <joswig-DBA30E.17242129092000@news.is-europe.net>
In article <···············@octagon.mrl.nyu.edu>, Marco Antoniotti 
<·······@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

> Hi
> 
> I answered the survey.  This is my personal agenda, but I urge
> everybody who will want to respond, to answer the question about the
> "shortcoming of (Common) Lisp" with a note about the "lack of
> non-proprietary standards beyond ANSI (GUI, FFI, Unicode/UTF, etc)".

But what good is it? Who is ITTA and what effect has answering
these questions? Who is using the report for what? Who
will draw what conclusions from the provided answers?
Why do they have interest in Lisp?

> A case in point.  Franz is putting up for grabs a set of XML utilities
> (hey, they are even LGPL'd).  Unfortunately these utilities seem to
> work *only* on ACL.  One of the main problems seems to be Unicode/UTF
> encoding.  Bruno Haible's CLisp has had Unicode support for quite some
> time.  LispWorks too.  ACL is setting up Unicode support now.
> 
> How are these implementations of the standard related?
> 
> Sooner or later Unicode support may make it into CMUCL and SBCL.  How
> should it be specified/implemented in these cases?

Btw., CL-HTTP comes with a contributed system: CL-XML.

-- 
Rainer Joswig, Hamburg, Germany
Email: ·············@corporate-world.lisp.de
Web: http://corporate-world.lisp.de/
From: Marco Antoniotti
Subject: Re: ITTA Lisp User Survey
Date: 
Message-ID: <y6cbsx7m97a.fsf@octagon.mrl.nyu.edu>
Rainer Joswig <······@corporate-world.lisp.de> writes:

> In article <···············@octagon.mrl.nyu.edu>, Marco Antoniotti 
> <·······@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Hi
> > 
> > I answered the survey.  This is my personal agenda, but I urge
> > everybody who will want to respond, to answer the question about the
> > "shortcoming of (Common) Lisp" with a note about the "lack of
> > non-proprietary standards beyond ANSI (GUI, FFI, Unicode/UTF, etc)".
> 
> But what good is it? Who is ITTA and what effect has answering
> these questions? Who is using the report for what? Who
> will draw what conclusions from the provided answers?
> Why do they have interest in Lisp?

These are good questions.  I basically took at face value their "good
faith".  BTW.  I took the survey because I got the announcement from Franz.

> > A case in point.  Franz is putting up for grabs a set of XML utilities
> > (hey, they are even LGPL'd).  Unfortunately these utilities seem to
> > work *only* on ACL.  One of the main problems seems to be Unicode/UTF
> > encoding.  Bruno Haible's CLisp has had Unicode support for quite some
> > time.  LispWorks too.  ACL is setting up Unicode support now.
> > 
> > How are these implementations of the standard related?
> > 
> > Sooner or later Unicode support may make it into CMUCL and SBCL.  How
> > should it be specified/implemented in these cases?
> 
> Btw., CL-HTTP comes with a contributed system: CL-XML.

Well, also the CLOCC has a set of XML utilities.  This is
good. BUT. What about Unicode and Friends?  These are things which
should be part of a standard.  IMHO, the CL community  simply *CANNOT*
afford to have platform dependent implementations of these things.

Cheers

-- 
Marco Antoniotti =============================================================
NYU Bioinformatics Group			 tel. +1 - 212 - 998 3488
719 Broadway 12th Floor                          fax  +1 - 212 - 995 4122
New York, NY 10003, USA				 http://galt.mrl.nyu.edu/valis
             Like DNA, such a language [Lisp] does not go out of style.
			      Paul Graham, ANSI Common Lisp
From: Thom Goodsell
Subject: Re: ITTA Lisp User Survey
Date: 
Message-ID: <7v8zsbi0gr.fsf@shalott.cra.com>
Marco Antoniotti <·······@cs.nyu.edu> writes:
> >
> > But what good is it? Who is ITTA and what effect has answering
> > these questions? Who is using the report for what? Who
> > will draw what conclusions from the provided answers?
> > Why do they have interest in Lisp?
> 
> These are good questions.  I basically took at face value their "good
> faith".  BTW.  I took the survey because I got the announcement from Franz.
> 

FWIW, I also got the announcement from Franz and assumed (perhaps
erroneously) that Franz was fronting the cost.  Presumably, they would
use it to direct product development.

Thom

-- 
Thom Goodsell                           ···@cra.com
Scientist                       (617) 491-3474 x574
Charles River Analytics         http://www.cra.com/
From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: Re: ITTA Lisp User Survey
Date: 
Message-ID: <ey3hf6z6sfm.fsf@cley.com>
* Marco Antoniotti wrote:
> Well, also the CLOCC has a set of XML utilities.  This is
> good. BUT. What about Unicode and Friends?  These are things which
> should be part of a standard.  IMHO, the CL community  simply *CANNOT*
> afford to have platform dependent implementations of these things.

I believe that Franz's unicode stuff may have public documentation --
certainly they've made a point of producing public documentation for
other stuff they've done, like simple streams. My experience is
that it's a reasonable design.  So it might be useful to start from
that and see what they do.  If the documentation is available I'm sure
someone from Franz will say where...

--tim (disclaimer, I know basically 0 about internationalisation, so
       perhaps the franz stuff is no good, but it didn't give me the
       kind of sickly feeling I get from really bad designs...)
From: Rainer Joswig
Subject: Re: ITTA Lisp User Survey
Date: 
Message-ID: <joswig-798B49.03500430092000@news.is-europe.net>
In article <···············@octagon.mrl.nyu.edu>, Marco Antoniotti 
<·······@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

> Well, also the CLOCC has a set of XML utilities.  This is
> good. BUT. What about Unicode and Friends?  These are things which
> should be part of a standard.  IMHO, the CL community  simply *CANNOT*
> afford to have platform dependent implementations of these things.

I'm not sure if that is really possible. Just look at the extensive
support for Unicode (and Font related technology) on the Mac
- I don't know if other platforms have all that stuff.
Chapter from the Apple Type Services for Unicode

  Chapter 2 ATSUI Reference 11
  Gestalt Selectors 12
  Functions for Manipulating Style Objects 14
  Creating, Clearing, and Disposing of Style Objects 15
  Copying Style Contents 22
  Flattening and Unflattening Style Objects 26
  Manipulating Style Run Attributes 29
  Manipulating Font Features 36
  Manipulating Font Variations in a Style Object 42
  Functions for Obtaining Font Data 47
  Identifying and Finding ATSUI-Compatible Fonts 47
  Finding Font Names 52
  Converting Between Font IDs and Family Numbers 59
  Obtaining Font Tracking Data 61
  Obtaining Font Feature Data 64
  Otaining Font Variation Data 70
  Obtaining Font Instance Data 74
  Functions for Manipulating Text Layout Objects 78
  Creating and Disposing of Text Layout Objects 78
  Manipulating Text Layout Attributes 90
  Manipulating Line Attributes 98
  Determining and Updating Text Memory Location 106
  Updating and Determining Style Runs 114
  Providing Font Substitutions 118
  Functions for Responding to User Actions 126
  Hit-Testing 126
  Obtaining Cursor Offsets 134
  Deleting and Inserting Text 141
  Measuring Typographic and Image Bounds 145
  Manipulating Line Breaks 156
  Drawing Text 162
  Highlighting and Unhighlighting Text 165
  Performing Background Processing 173
  Functions for Manipulating Memory Settings 174
  Application-Defined Functions for Controlling Memory Allocation 178
  Data Types 182
  Resource 199
  Flattened Text Layout Data 201
  Flattened Style Run Data 202
  Flattened Style List Data 202
  Constants 203
  Baseline Type Constants 204
  Clear All Constant 206
  Current Pen Location Constant 206
  Cursor Movement Constants 207
  Font Fallback Constants 208
  Font Name Language Code Constants 209
  Font Name Code Constants 213
  Font Name Platform Code Constants 216
  Font Name Script Code Constants 217
  Glyph Bounds Constants 222
  Glyph Direction Constants 223
  Glyph Orientation Constants 223
  Heap Specification Constants 224
  Invalid Font ID Constant 226
  Justification Override Mask Constants 226
  Justification Priority Constants 228
  Line Alignment Constants 229
  Line Height Constant 230
  Line Justification Constants 230
  Line Layout Option Mask Constants 231
  Line Layout Width Constant 233
  Miscellaneous Constants 234
  No Font Name Platform, Language, or Script Constants 235
  Style Comparison Constants 236
  Style Run Attribute Tags 237
  Text Layout and Line Attribute Tags 250
  Text Length Constant 255
  Text Offset Constant 256
  Result Codes 256

Defining an Unicode standard for CL would be a task for experts.

-- 
Rainer Joswig, Hamburg, Germany
Email: ·············@corporate-world.lisp.de
Web: http://corporate-world.lisp.de/