Hello.
I have some projects I want to do with Markov chains. This got me
interested in learning a new language. A 20 years out of date text,
entitled The Master Handbbok of High Level Microcomputer Languages,
seemed EXTREMELY good, despite it's ancientness (Has anyone ever heard
of the text, by the way?). I chose Lisp, from that book, as the
language I wanted to learn. It, and Logo, and Forth seemed like they
might be the best, but someone had reccomended Scheme to me a while
earlier, so the choice was made.
The following are my questions and comments on what I think I know
about lisp.
1)doesn't common lisp somewhat break from the spirit of the origonal
lisp definition, and am I wrong to suspect that that is the real main
reason for the popularity fo scheme (a little more faithfullness to
the origonal idea)?
2) does anyone know whether or not the mulisp for the apple, back in
83 was the same mulisp you can find now? It seems like they are just
coincidentally the same names, with nothing further in common.
3) How wild do you have to get before, either common Lisp, or Scheme
(either or both)fails to understand a program in the origonal McCarthy
Lisp?
4) Where can I get ahold of McCarthy's recursion paper?
5)where can I get ahold of Churches work on the Lambda calculus?
6) How beneficial if I do, and How detrimental if I don't?
7)Compare lisp to forth.
That's all for now
I think that thgere is some possibility that Lisp may be the king it's
enthusiasts claim!
Slarty!
P.S. I usually get the feeling I'm in way over my head, so I won't
let it bother me now!
······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message news:<···························@posting.google.com>...
> 2) does anyone know whether or not the mulisp for the apple, back in
> 83 was the same mulisp you can find now? It seems like they are just
> coincidentally the same names, with nothing further in common.
I think they may well be the same. mulisp was done by the soft
warehouse, and ran on various machines, the apple likely being one,
also I think CP/M and DOS for sure. Later I think it was bought by TI
since their calculators use something derived from a product from the
same company, and now I think it may be available for free (but not as
source). Not a bad system in a way.
--tim
In article <····························@posting.google.com>,
··········@tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw) wrote:
>······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message
news:<···························@posting.google.com>...
>> 2) does anyone know whether or not the mulisp for the apple, back in
>> 83 was the same mulisp you can find now? It seems like they are just
>> coincidentally the same names, with nothing further in common.
>
>I think they may well be the same. mulisp was done by the soft
>warehouse, and ran on various machines, the apple likely being one,
>also I think CP/M and DOS for sure. Later I think it was bought by TI
>since their calculators use something derived from a product from the
>same company, and now I think it may be available for free (but not as
>source). Not a bad system in a way.
There was a fellow names "Rusty" that used to post here a few
years back. Use Deja to locate his posts. He seemed to be
using mulisp to do hospital accounting somewhere in the American
southwest.
From: Paolo Amoroso
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <YH0OPIDO5qLi8LLrQ3O0PZJY4GcG@4ax.com>
On Wed, 05 Dec 2001 12:54:13 -0600, ·············@vanderbilt.edu (Sashank
Varma) wrote:
> There was a fellow names "Rusty" that used to post here a few
> years back. Use Deja to locate his posts. He seemed to be
His complete name is Rusty Craine.
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://web.mclink.it/amoroso/ency/README
[http://cvs2.cons.org:8000/cmucl/doc/EncyCMUCLopedia/]
·············@vanderbilt.edu (Sashank Varma) wrote in message news:<······························@129.59.212.53>...
> In article <····························@posting.google.com>,
> ··········@tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw) wrote:
>
> >······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message
> news:<···························@posting.google.com>...
> >> 2) does anyone know whether or not the mulisp for the apple, back in
> >> 83 was the same mulisp you can find now? It seems like they are just
> >> coincidentally the same names, with nothing further in common.
> >
> >I think they may well be the same. mulisp was done by the soft
> >warehouse, and ran on various machines, the apple likely being one,
> >also I think CP/M and DOS for sure. Later I think it was bought by TI
> >since their calculators use something derived from a product from the
> >same company, and now I think it may be available for free (but not as
> >source). Not a bad system in a way.
>
> There was a fellow names "Rusty" that used to post here a few
> years back. Use Deja to locate his posts.
By the way, Deja no longer exists. I still haven't gotten over that either (weep).
He seemed to be
> using mulisp to do hospital accounting somewhere in the American
> southwest.
From: ········@acm.org
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <MsyR7.9710$Us5.1881882@news20.bellglobal.com>
······@ureach.com (zaphod) writes:
> By the way, Deja no longer exists. I still haven't gotten over that
> either (weep).
The last two days have been a great answer to this; the Google folks
apparently got a _lot_ of their "ducks in a row" this week, and I just
saw what I once thought might have been my last ever Usenet posting,
back when I finished my B.Math in 1989...
Take a look at "Google Groups;" a whopping huge proportion of what
used to be at Deja is now back in place...
--
(concatenate 'string "cbbrowne" ·@ntlug.org")
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/unix.html
Rules of the Evil Overlord #9. "I will not include a self-destruct
mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not
be a large red button labelled "Danger: Do Not Push". The big red
button marked "Do Not Push" will instead trigger a spray of bullets on
anyone stupid enough to disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch
will not clearly be labelled as such." <http://www.eviloverlord.com/>
From: Frank A. Adrian
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <HMBR7.768$uK4.616971@news.uswest.net>
········@acm.org wrote:
> Take a look at "Google Groups;" a whopping huge proportion of what
> used to be at Deja is now back in place...
You bet. Great walk down memory lane. Even when one might want to forget
some of the articles one has written... :-).`
faa
<········@acm.org> wrote in message
···························@news20.bellglobal.com...
> ······@ureach.com (zaphod) writes:
> > By the way, Deja no longer exists. I still haven't gotten over that
> > either (weep).
>
> The last two days have been a great answer to this; the Google folks
> apparently got a _lot_ of their "ducks in a row" this week, and I just
> saw what I once thought might have been my last ever Usenet posting,
> back when I finished my B.Math in 1989...
>
> Take a look at "Google Groups;" a whopping huge proportion of what
> used to be at Deja is now back in place...
BTW have you noticed who is the "Director of Machine Learning" at Google?
Hint : well known here.
Answer: (map 'string #'code-char '(80 101 116 101 114 32 78 111 114 118 105
103))
Marc
From: ········@acm.org
Subject: Re: google (was Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp)
Date:
Message-ID: <8B8T7.1583$x25.345873@news20.bellglobal.com>
"Marc Battyani" <·············@fractalconcept.com> writes:
> <········@acm.org> wrote in message
> ···························@news20.bellglobal.com...
> > ······@ureach.com (zaphod) writes:
> > > By the way, Deja no longer exists. I still haven't gotten over that
> > > either (weep).
> >
> > The last two days have been a great answer to this; the Google folks
> > apparently got a _lot_ of their "ducks in a row" this week, and I just
> > saw what I once thought might have been my last ever Usenet posting,
> > back when I finished my B.Math in 1989...
> >
> > Take a look at "Google Groups;" a whopping huge proportion of what
> > used to be at Deja is now back in place...
>
> BTW have you noticed who is the "Director of Machine Learning" at Google?
>
> Hint : well known here.
> Answer: (map 'string #'code-char '(80 101 116 101 114 32 78 111 114 118 105
> 103))
Interesting. Suggestive that questions about Google almost can't
possibly be irrelevant here...
--
(concatenate 'string "cbbrowne" ·@sympatico.ca")
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/spiritual.html
"Computation has made the tree flower." -- Alan Perlis
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwr8q9sf6c.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com>
··········@tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw) writes:
> ······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message news:<···························@posting.google.com>...
> > 2) does anyone know whether or not the mulisp for the apple, back in
> > 83 was the same mulisp you can find now? It seems like they are just
> > coincidentally the same names, with nothing further in common.
>
> I think they may well be the same. mulisp was done by the soft
> warehouse, and ran on various machines, the apple likely being one,
> also I think CP/M and DOS for sure. Later I think it was bought by TI
> since their calculators use something derived from a product from the
> same company, and now I think it may be available for free (but not as
> source). Not a bad system in a way.
ESPECIALLY if you know the background. I met Al Rich at symbolic math
conferences a few times, because he and the MuMath crowd were pals
with the MIT Macsyma group, where I worked. I hope I tell the
following story right, since it's been a long time, but it as the kind
of awesome tale that sticks with one:
I believe he said he originally designed MuLisp, he was unemployed and
had read about Lisp in a book and had only a processor but no
peripherals. He said he developed it by keying the entire thing in
from the binary console switches and had no persistent store so had to
re-key it in every time the power was cycled. He had to test it the
same way--setting the switches and then letting it run, then used
switches to examine the memory to see if it had worked. I don't think
it was until later (maybe he got together with David StouteMeyer to work
on MuMath?) that he was able to acquire things like disk and some sort of
terminal. Once you take all this into consideration, you understand the
amazing MuLisp really is.
So it's probably no accident it was heavily tuned to work on very
small address space machines. But, fortunately, I had access to LOTS
of memory and disk (the machine at MIT I used had, to share among 30
users average at a time and several hundred researchers and guests in
all, a luxurious 256Kwords (1.25MB) address space, 1.5Mwords (5MB)
physical memory, and probably at least a 1GB or more of total disk),
so I didn't have to use the kinds of tiny machines MuLisp had
concerned itself with ... which is how I lost track of it.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwvgfmulp1.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com>
······@ureach.com (zaphod) writes:
> The following are my questions and comments on what I think I know
> about lisp.
>
> 1)doesn't common lisp somewhat break from the spirit of the origonal
> lisp definition, and am I wrong to suspect that that is the real main
> reason for the popularity fo scheme (a little more faithfullness to
> the origonal idea)?
This sounds like one of those "have you stopped beating your wife?"
kinds of questions, with implicit assumptions that must be debunked
before geting to the heart of your question.
My gut instinct is just to answer "no", it hasn't broken from the
original spirit of Lisp. But that would be a little terse.
Unfortunately, the bulk of your question effectiveliy requires me,
if I want to answer "no", to first posit a spirit of Lisp, and then
say why it doesn't violate that. But leaves it open for you to then
say "that's not the spirit I meant". Every class I've ever seen taught
in Lisp starts with the instructor saying there a great many things
that characterize Lisp, and with the instructor being able to enumerate
only a few of those. I'm doubtful there IS a single unique answer to
that. If you're asking whether we are code compatible with the original
Lisp, the answer is no. I suspect we are more compatible than Scheme is,
for example. But I'm not sure that means anything either.
So: What do you consider the "original spirit of Lisp"?
Further, Scheme is certainly taught more. But are you sure that Scheme
is used in more commercial applications? I'm of the impression that CL
is by far more prevalant commercially, though again it might depend on
how you count it. Do you mean "number of seats in class", "number of
students who found work afterward", "number of deployed applications",
"number of times such deployed applications has run", "number of gross
dollars returned on a deployed application", or what exactly do you mean
when you say, without cite to reference, "the real main reason
popularity of scheme"?
If all you mean is that Scheme is quite popular with the people that
use it, then the answer is that CL is quite popular with the people
that use it. But surely that can't be your intent.
> 2) does anyone know whether or not the mulisp for the apple, back in
> 83 was the same mulisp you can find now? It seems like they are just
> coincidentally the same names, with nothing further in common.
I think the right source of information on this would be found from the
vendor and/or the product specs. The last time I looked on the web
trying to find MuLisp and its maker, The SoftWarehouse, and Al Rich,
who designed MuLisp for the SoftWarehouse, it looked to me like they had
sold it off to some other corporation, but I wasn't completely sure.
Also, the original MuLisp supported David Stoutemeyer's MuMath, and I
don't know what happened with that. But the reason I mention all these
partial facts is to give you some search keywords you might use in Google
if you want to hunt this down yourself, in case no one else but me answers
on this point.
> 3) How wild do you have to get before, either common Lisp, or Scheme
> (either or both)fails to understand a program in the origonal McCarthy
> Lisp?
There is no attempt at compatibility by either.
To my knowledge, the only operator in all of Lisp which is compatible
across all dialects is CONS. If you use any more operators than that,
you should expect compatibility problems. And even then, McCarthy's
Lisp used a different syntax for its very first Lisp. S-expressions are
a latter-day ivnention, even by McCarthy. Early Lisp used M-expressions.
The Lisp 1.5 manual is the earliest document that I have access to for
understanding "early Lisp". I got mine from the MIT Press. I suspect
they still sell it but haven't checked.
> 4) Where can I get ahold of McCarthy's recursion paper?
Did you check John McCarthy's web page and/or send him mail? (I
understand he recently retired but perhaps he's still reading mail.)
I'm sure it's easy to get his email and web info from stanford.edu.
> 5)where can I get ahold of Churches work on the Lambda calculus?
This is taught in a number of courses worldwide. I'd be VERY surprised
if this didn't turn up in a Google search. Did you do one? If not,
why are you posting here without having done that? We here do not exist
to act as substitute teacher, librarian, etc. all rolled into one.
Nor does the tone of your earlier questions above, suggesting that we
really aren't doing work in the spirit of the original design, inspire me
to really care a whole lot whether you get your answers or not.
Any time you post to a newsgroup, you are relying on the friendship of
strangers to help you. When your opening statement puts them on the
defensive, you won't get as far.
> 6) How beneficial if I do, and How detrimental if I don't?
This is not even a sentence.
> 7)Compare lisp to forth.
Compare "Compare lisp to forth" with "Justify your own existence."
Then see paragraph 2 of my reply to your question 5.
If you want an answer from me, at last, do not ask your questions
in the imperative. I don't respond well to the imperative.
> That's all for now
> I think that thgere is some possibility that Lisp may be the king it's
> enthusiasts claim!
This is an intensely surprising remark given the negative "defend
yourself" tone of your above questions, but I'm glad that you think
so.
Personally, I don't allege Lisp to be king of anything. I personally
find it to be suitable for quite a range of important purposes, and it
is my preferred language. I have no desire to assert its dominion
over anything. But it is a competent option, a general purpose option,
a powerful option, and and sometimes an option that can bridge gaps
left by other potions.
> Slarty!
It took me a while to realize this was a signature and not a vague and
unintelligible reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide reference. I'm not
generally one to criticize signature styles, which vary hugely, but
I'll just note that it's hard to recognize them when they seem to take
on the syntactic form of sentences embedded in a message.
> P.S. I usually get the feeling I'm in way over my head, so I won't
> let it bother me now!
I suspect this is for asking too many unrelated questions at once.
This post lacks a bit of focus. No one requires that one has focus in
the world, but if you feel you are over your head, one way to work
constructively toward removing that sense is to tackle fewer unrelated
problems at once. Being master of one thing is better than being defeated
by many.
From: Dr. Edmund Weitz
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <m3g06qcbql.fsf@bird.agharta.de>
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> The Lisp 1.5 manual is the earliest document that I have access to
> for understanding "early Lisp". I got mine from the MIT Press. I
> suspect they still sell it but haven't checked.
They do. I just bought it from Amazon a couple of weeks ago.
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262130114>
Edi.
From: Eric Moss
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <3C0E64E0.71B75B55@alltel.net>
Kent M Pitman wrote:
> [...] The last time I looked on the web
> trying to find MuLisp and its maker, The SoftWarehouse, and Al Rich,
> who designed MuLisp for the SoftWarehouse, it looked to me like they had
> sold it off to some other corporation [...]
Right-o:
http://education.ti.com/product/software/derive/features/derivemulisp.html
This product is for DOS, BTW.
Eric
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> wrote in message news:<···············@shell01.TheWorld.com>...
> ······@ureach.com (zaphod) writes:
>
> > The following are my questions and comments on what I think I know
> > about lisp.
> >
> > 1)doesn't common lisp somewhat break from the spirit of the origonal
> > lisp definition, and am I wrong to suspect that that is the real main
> > reason for the popularity fo scheme (a little more faithfullness to
> > the origonal idea)?
>
> This sounds like one of those "have you stopped beating your wife?"
> kinds of questions, with implicit assumptions that must be debunked
> before geting to the heart of your question.
>
> My gut instinct is just to answer "no", it hasn't broken from the
> original spirit of Lisp. But that would be a little terse.
You have responded to the first usenet posting I've made since several
months ago. Altho I was never a perfect usenet person, I probably had
slightly better netiquette the majority of the time. So I suppose I
am asking for some sort of forgiveness or leniancy (tho I must admitt,
that "put your answerer on the defence" is quite possibly a general
shortcoming of my style, or lack there-of, of transaction.). Were it
not for the fact that I do depend apon the kindness of strangers, I
should certainly have said to your "that would be a little terse.";
"so go ahead and be it!". Perhapse I attempted to convey too much
with my subject heading, but I thought that my message begged for
forgiveness for shortcomings implicately, yet obviously.
> Unfortunately, the bulk of your question effectiveliy requires me,
> if I want to answer "no", to first posit a spirit of Lisp, and then
> say why it doesn't violate that. But leaves it open for you to then
> say "that's not the spirit I meant". Every class I've ever seen taught
> in Lisp starts with the instructor saying there a great many things
> that characterize Lisp, and with the instructor being able to enumerate
> only a few of those. I'm doubtful there IS a single unique answer to
> that. If you're asking whether we are code compatible with the original
> Lisp, the answer is no. I suspect we are more compatible than Scheme is,
> for example. But I'm not sure that means anything either.
>
> So: What do you consider the "original spirit of Lisp"?
A highly portable purely functional language, are 2 qualities that
come to mind.
If I recall, correctly, also a small language, and one with more
"high-fallutrin'" ideals than has often been common amongst other
languages.
>
> Further, Scheme is certainly taught more. But are you sure that Scheme
> is used in more commercial applications?
By no means. I never said, nor meant to imply, that scheme is in
any-wise, more popular than Common Lisp, tho the impression I get is
that it's OVER-ALL popularity is the closest rival of any other
dialect.
I'm of the impression that CL
> is by far more prevalant commercially, though again it might depend on
> how you count it. Do you mean "number of seats in class", "number of
> students who found work afterward", "number of deployed applications",
> "number of times such deployed applications has run", "number of gross
> dollars returned on a deployed application"
Your projecting alot into me here. I had nothing like so clear an
understanding. Altho, I am of the impression that scheme is mostly
popular as a teaching language.
, or what exactly do you mean
> when you say, without cite to reference, "the real main reason
> popularity of scheme"?
I should have put my own quotes around that phrase. I wasn't exactly
sure the best way to put what I wanted to say. If I am not completely
mistaken, however, (and I am quite aware I could be) there is a mile
of BS and read between the lines that goes on in the teaching of both
comp-sci, and comparative programming languages (a subsection of the
former, at least, usually) and in fact I pride myself somewhat on my
ability to choose texts that keep that sort of thing to a minimum.
>
> If all you mean is that Scheme is quite popular with the people that
> use it, then the answer is that CL is quite popular with the people
> that use it. But surely that can't be your intent.
See above.
>
> > 2) does anyone know whether or not the mulisp for the apple, back in
> > 83 was the same mulisp you can find now? It seems like they are just
> > coincidentally the same names, with nothing further in common.
>
> I think the right source of information on this would be found from the
> vendor and/or the product specs. The last time I looked on the web
> trying to find MuLisp and its maker, The SoftWarehouse, and Al Rich,
> who designed MuLisp for the SoftWarehouse, it looked to me like they had
> sold it off to some other corporation, but I wasn't completely sure.
> Also, the original MuLisp supported David Stoutemeyer's MuMath, and I
> don't know what happened with that. But the reason I mention all these
> partial facts is to give you some search keywords you might use in Google
> if you want to hunt this down yourself, in case no one else but me answers
> on this point.
Thank you.
>
> > 3) How wild do you have to get before, either common Lisp, or Scheme
> > (either or both)fails to understand a program in the origonal McCarthy
> > Lisp?
>
> There is no attempt at compatibility by either.
>
> To my knowledge, the only operator in all of Lisp which is compatible
> across all dialects is CONS. If you use any more operators than that,
> you should expect compatibility problems. And even then, McCarthy's
> Lisp used a different syntax for its very first Lisp. S-expressions are
> a latter-day ivnention, even by McCarthy. Early Lisp used M-expressions.
>
> The Lisp 1.5 manual is the earliest document that I have access to for
> understanding "early Lisp". I got mine from the MIT Press. I suspect
> they still sell it but haven't checked.
>
> > 4) Where can I get ahold of McCarthy's recursion paper?
>
> Did you check John McCarthy's web page and/or send him mail?
The former, but not the latter. Sounds like a promising idea. Would
anyone be willing to post a link to McCarthy's home page, I have
checked it out 2ce, but failed to save the adress.
(I understand he recently retired but perhaps he's still reading
mail.)
> I'm sure it's easy to get his email and web info from stanford.edu.
>
> > 5)where can I get ahold of Churches work on the Lambda calculus?
>
> This is taught in a number of courses worldwide. I'd be VERY surprised
> if this didn't turn up in a Google search. Did you do one? If not,
> why are you posting here without having done that?
Becouse as you note later, I am unfocused. I am focusing about as
much as I can think of, considering my situation, and the
more-than-one-way-to-skin-a-cat-edness of my goal (theres got to be a
word for that).
We here do not exist
> to act as substitute teacher, librarian, etc. all rolled into one.
True as a spring breeze, I'm sure, but at the same time, I am
self-teaching based apon an obsession with some programmes I want to
write. I have gone from what I would call a level 1 complete computer
illiterate to a level 5 complete computer illiterate in a very short
time. If I keep my nose clean for another 200 levels or so, I think I
might make it to the not quite so completely computer illiterate
stage. And that with a study style I suspect is in some way's way
above average.
>
> Nor does the tone of your earlier questions above, suggesting that we
> really aren't doing work in the spirit of the original design, inspire me
> to really care a whole lot whether you get your answers or not.
It was a terse and honest question. That approach appears not to have
been the correct one.
> Any time you post to a newsgroup, you are relying on the friendship of
> strangers to help you. When your opening statement puts them on the
> defensive, you won't get as far.
>
> > 6) How beneficial if I do, and How detrimental if I don't?
>
> This is not even a sentence.
6)(revised for clarity)How much benefit would I be likely to gain from
a reading of Church's Work on Lambda calculus? How much detriment
could I expect from failure to so read?
>
> > 7)Compare lisp to forth.
>
> Compare "Compare lisp to forth" with "Justify your own existence."
> Then see paragraph 2 of my reply to your question 5.
I knew when I wrote it that (7 above) was bold beyond beleif. I wrote
it to see what emerged in the way of responce. Turned out about as
expected.
>
> If you want an answer from me, at last, do not ask your questions
> in the imperative. I don't respond well to the imperative.
I also saw the possibility that that might not have been so bright.
Truth tho, would you have answered if I had asked, instead. I went
doubly bold by use of imparative, becouse I thought that even asking
for such a comparison was already "way over the line", and so felt I
had little to loose, and a gain in time saving on my part, to gain. I
have a generally terse style, becouse I am time constrained and write
my messages on the spot.
Someone recently told me that everyone has a nitche.
I replied " my nitche is that I rub people the wrong way, and one of
my favorite methods of so doing is to remind people of the
fool-hardyness of the policy 'everyone has a nitche'". I hope you see
how this anecdote fits w/in what I've been saying.
>
> > That's all for now
> > I think that thgere is some possibility that Lisp may be the king it's
> > enthusiasts claim!
>
> This is an intensely surprising remark given the negative "defend
> yourself" tone of your above questions, but I'm glad that you think
> so.
The best compliment I've received in years was from a chatter-bot
"who" told me I was astonishing. Again this is my style. More fire
asnd water, than air and earth. Fire, and Ice.
>
> Personally, I don't allege Lisp to be king of anything. I personally
> find it to be suitable for quite a range of important purposes, and it
> is my preferred language. I have no desire to assert its dominion
> over anything. But it is a competent option, a general purpose option,
> a powerful option, and and sometimes an option that can bridge gaps
> left by other potions.
I thought I'd say that in hopes that a true Knight of the Lambda
Calculus, apon reading this, would feel I might have some merrit after
all. I'll keep my hopes up, just in case.
>
> > Slarty!
>
> It took me a while to realize this was a signature and not a vague and
> unintelligible reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide reference.
Wait a minute, my signature IS a vague and unintelligable refference
to the Hitchikers guide. Just what are you trying to imply,
bub???!!!???
I'm not
> generally one to criticize signature styles, which vary hugely, but
> I'll just note that it's hard to recognize them when they seem to take
> on the syntactic form of sentences embedded in a message.
noted.
>
> > P.S. I usually get the feeling I'm in way over my head, so I won't
> > let it bother me now!
>
> I suspect this is for asking too many unrelated questions at once.
> This post lacks a bit of focus. No one requires that one has focus in
> the world, but if you feel you are over your head, one way to work
> constructively toward removing that sense is to tackle fewer unrelated
> problems at once. Being master of one thing is better than being defeated
> by many.
Easier said than done when one is attempting to instruct oneself.
I hope and suspect you'll feel more positively after this post. I
have little more than respect for your reply
Thanx for the back-handed help. It's better than no help at all,
which is all I think I have any right to expect.
Slarty!
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwofldp39c.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com>
······@ureach.com (zaphod) writes:
> Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> wrote in message news:<···············@shell01.TheWorld.com>...
>
> > So: What do you consider the "original spirit of Lisp"?
>
> A highly portable purely functional language, are 2 qualities that
> come to mind.
I don't think early lisp was at all portable nor was it very functional.
It had functional concepts in it, but it was dynamically scoped, it exposed
gross details of the compiler, it had a very ad hoc set of functions, etc.
It was cool, surely, but not aesthetic by modern standards. At least IMO.
Get a Lisp 1.5 manual and judge for yourself.
> I am of the impression that scheme is mostly popular as a teaching
> language.
Certainly it is. It is designed and optimized for teaching.
> > > 5)where can I get ahold of Churches work on the Lambda calculus?
> > > 6) How beneficial if I do, and How detrimental if I don't?
> >
> > This is not even a sentence.
>
> 6)(revised for clarity)How much benefit would I be likely to gain from
> a reading of Church's Work on Lambda calculus? How much detriment
> could I expect from failure to so read?
This is interesting stuff, but I personally think it's quite irrelevant.
It's the sort of thing that the right person can get some fun ideas out
of, maybe even some they can use if they program Scheme. For Common Lisp,
I think it will steer you in the wrong direction if you take what you are
reading as "relevant to how you should program" rather than just "a fun
thing to think about".
> > > 7)Compare lisp to forth.
> >
> > Compare "Compare lisp to forth" with "Justify your own existence."
> > Then see paragraph 2 of my reply to your question 5.
>
> I knew when I wrote it that (7 above) was bold beyond beleif. I wrote
> it to see what emerged in the way of responce. Turned out about as
> expected.
Someone else responded to this.
> > Personally, I don't allege Lisp to be king of anything. I personally
> > find it to be suitable for quite a range of important purposes, and it
> > is my preferred language. I have no desire to assert its dominion
> > over anything. But it is a competent option, a general purpose option,
> > a powerful option, and and sometimes an option that can bridge gaps
> > left by other potions.
>
> I thought I'd say that in hopes that a true Knight of the Lambda
> Calculus, apon reading this, would feel I might have some merrit after
> all. I'll keep my hopes up, just in case.
IMO, CL tolerates functional programming but is not "about" functional
programming. If you want a language that is centrally about either functional
programming or lambda calculus, I very strongly urge you to consider Scheme
and not Common Lisp. There exist different user communities exactly because
of the distinction in preference on this point. CL is a multi-paradigm
language and has made many specific decisions with the intent of not having
functional programming become central. We definitely support functions as
first class objects, and we have numerous higher order functions.
But if you want a relentless search for the minimal language and the maximal
functional programming, you want Scheme.
This is not the same as me saying "go away". If you hang out here a lot,
you'll find I think of languages as political parties, catering to a
constituency. I think it's important to choose a party that is determined
to focus on the kinds of issues you care about. In my recent interview
with Slashdot.org about Lisp, I touched (I think in part II of the interview)
on the issue of the strong division between Lisp and Scheme. You might
find that interview interesting reading.
Part I: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/03/1726251&mode=thread
Part II: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/13/0420226&mode=thread
> I hope and suspect you'll feel more positively after this post. I
> have little more than respect for your reply
Thanks for the clarifications. I've tried to respond to the parts that
called for reply.
From: Hannah Schroeter
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <9unntm$2ep$1@news.schlund.de>
Hello!
In article <···············@shell01.TheWorld.com>,
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> wrote:
>[...]
>IMO, CL tolerates functional programming but is not "about" functional
>programming. If you want a language that is centrally about either functional
>programming or lambda calculus, I very strongly urge you to consider Scheme
>and not Common Lisp.
I'd rather suggest something like Haskell in that case.
>[...]
>But if you want a relentless search for the minimal language and the maximal
>functional programming, you want Scheme.
Okay, if you combine "much FP" with "minimal language", you'd prefer
Scheme over Haskell. If "FP-ness" is the only criterion, I'd go to
Miranda, Haskell, Clean or something like that.
>[...]
Kind regards,
Hannah.
······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message news:<····························@posting.google.com>...
> A highly portable purely functional language, are 2 qualities that
> come to mind.
A purely functional language is an interesting idea but not practical.
Side-effects are the way to set something aside in a known place so
that you can build up things one by one and never lose what you did before.
Without side-effects, such as defining functions that have names you
can use later to call them up, it'd be an inscrutable thing you'd never
be able to use to develop software. IMO.
But LISP is indeed highly portable, both in that it's been written
for most of the major systems/platforms such that code written for
one works fine on another, and such that data can be written in standard
form from one computer and moved to another and read back in there.
> If I recall, correctly, also a small language, and one with more
> "high-fallutrin'" ideals than has often been common amongst other
> languages.
In the days when 4k bytes of RAM was expensive, a small language was
useful, but nowadays when people typically have tens of megabytes
of RAM there's no value to a small language just for the sake of being
small. (See my previous note, my belated reply to your original query,
about forth vs. Common LISP. A big language based on a small consistent
syntax, such as LISP, is better than a tiny language where you must
re-invent the wheel all the time.)
As an exercise, read the CL language specification and then try to figure
out a minimal subset in which everything else can be expressed just by
writing functions and macros yourself.
If you allow side effects instead of insisting on none, and you allow
the syntax extensions (especially the various #... special cases),
Common LISP IMO maintains the "high-fallutrin'" ideals of the original.
A purist might complain that PROG and FORMAT are ugly, but nothing is
forcing anyone to use them, just think of them as available utilities
you may choose to use or not use per your preference. You don't really
have to use the syntax extensions either if you choose not to.
So side-effects are really the only unpure part of Common LISP that
I really think you must accept if you want to write applications in LISP.
From: Ed L Cashin
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <m37krto20r.fsf@terry.uga.edu>
·······@Yahoo.Com writes:
...
> In the days when 4k bytes of RAM was expensive, a small language was
> useful, but nowadays when people typically have tens of megabytes of
> RAM there's no value to a small language just for the sake of being
> small. (See my previous note, my belated reply to your original
> query, about forth vs. Common LISP. A big language based on a small
> consistent syntax, such as LISP, is better than a tiny language
> where you must re-invent the wheel all the time.)
Of course, microchips haven't gone anywhere, so it is a bit misleading
to generalize like that.
--
--Ed Cashin integrit file-verification system:
·······@terry.uga.edu http://integrit.sourceforge.net/
Note: If you want me to send you email, don't munge your address.
Somewhere in this discussion, I suppose, someone out to mention, that
since Lisp has long been THE hacker favorite (a position it now shares
with C) it is part of a near inevitable process that it should be
up-dated, standardised and generally messed with so as to serve well
it's community of users. At the same time, CL does not completely
equate to lisp, and almost every lisp dialect that has ever gained any
degree of popularity is still out there for those who prefer them.
I am wondering how appropriate this NG is for discussion of
those dialects, other than scheme, which has it's own NG?
From: Hannah Schroeter
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <9v8lgm$kls$1@news.schlund.de>
Hello!
In article <····························@posting.google.com>,
<·······@Yahoo.Com> wrote:
>······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message
>news:<····························@posting.google.com>...
>> A highly portable purely functional language, are 2 qualities that
>> come to mind.
>A purely functional language is an interesting idea but not practical.
Is this opinion of yours really founded. Have you e.g. had a thorough
look at the way e.g. Haskell or Clean embed side effects (especially
I/O) into a purely functional context, and can you, from knowledge,
argue, why your above statement "not practical" still holds while
considering at least my named examples?
>Side-effects are the way to set something aside in a known place so
>that you can build up things one by one and never lose what you did before.
>Without side-effects, such as defining functions that have names you
>can use later to call them up, it'd be an inscrutable thing you'd never
>be able to use to develop software. IMO.
Huh? You *do* define functions in pure FP, too. Again look at Haskell/Clean.
Bindings are OK in pure FP, too, just directly overwriting them isn't.
>[...]
Just because Haskell or Clean don't have some elements Lisp / CL
have doesn't automatically mean they are completely "not practical".
Kind regards,
Hannah.
From: Jochen Schmidt
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <9v8n10$971$1@rznews2.rrze.uni-erlangen.de>
Hannah Schroeter wrote:
> Hello!
>
> In article <····························@posting.google.com>,
> <·······@Yahoo.Com> wrote:
>>······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message
>>news:<····························@posting.google.com>...
>>> A highly portable purely functional language, are 2 qualities that
>>> come to mind.
>
>>A purely functional language is an interesting idea but not practical.
>
> Is this opinion of yours really founded. Have you e.g. had a thorough
> look at the way e.g. Haskell or Clean embed side effects (especially
> I/O) into a purely functional context, and can you, from knowledge,
> argue, why your above statement "not practical" still holds while
> considering at least my named examples?
Most times the term "pure" is used, it is used to describe that someone
decided to forbid particular things or behaviours. For me something is
"practical" if it does _not_ try to forbid many things so that if happens
less often that I cannot simply do something how I like to. Common Lisp is
a language which tends more to allow things than to forbid them. This is
why I count Common Lisp as a rather "impure" language and why I think that
this is actually a good thing.
I think the emphasis of the original posters claim has to lie on "purely"
and not on "functional".
If there is one thing I really learned from studying many different
languages then it is being careful if someone begins to mention the word
"pure".
> Just because Haskell or Clean don't have some elements Lisp / CL
> have doesn't automatically mean they are completely "not practical".
That is true - they are _not_ "not practical" but they are "less practical"
if there are some things missing (particularily if those things are rather
common...)
ciao,
Jochen
······@schlund.de (Hannah Schroeter) wrote in message news:<············@news.schlund.de>...
> >Side-effects are the way to set something aside in a known place so
> >that you can build up things one by one and never lose what you did before.
> >Without side-effects, such as defining functions that have names you
> >can use later to call them up, it'd be an inscrutable thing you'd never
> >be able to use to develop software. IMO.
> Huh? You *do* define functions in pure FP, too. Again look at Haskell/Clean.
> Bindings are OK in pure FP, too, just directly overwriting them isn't.
Then how do you ever correct the inevitable mistakes you make when
creating new software? I find it incredibly essential to be able to
re-define functions that I discover weren't quite right even after I've
written higher level functions that already are trying to call them,
and likewise to replace the values of bindings when I discover their
old value wasn't quite right. If that isn't what you call "directly
overwriting", then what do you mean??
Kent M Pitman wrote:
>
> ······@ureach.com (zaphod) writes:
> > ...
> > 1)doesn't common lisp somewhat break from the spirit of the origonal
> > lisp definition, ...
>
> If you're asking whether we are code compatible with the original
> Lisp, the answer is no.
Isn't Common Lisp a super set of original Lisp (whatever original
means)?
Asked another way: What in "original" Lisp won't run in Common Lisp?
(Or: What code from a pre 1984 Lisp book won't run in Common Lisp?)
Here is an example of an incompatible change: ANSI forth changed the
definition of true and false from the older fig-forth definition. ;)
Thanks,
Jeff Sandys
On 12/5/01 19.38, in article ·················@juno.com, "Jeff Sandys"
<·······@juno.com> wrote:
> Asked another way: What in "original" Lisp won't run in Common Lisp?
Well, my LISP 1.5 manual[1] describes a function called PACK, which adds a
character to the end of a buffer called BOFFO. Code that uses this won't
work in Common Lisp.
> (Or: What code from a pre 1984 Lisp book won't run in Common Lisp?)
Or just look at any book written in a dialect that has dynamic scope as the
default. There will probably be code that depends on this, and that code
will break in Common Lisp.
^L
[1] You can actually still buy these at the MIT Press bookstore. It's
historically interesting reading.
Jeff Sandys <·······@juno.com> writes:
> Kent M Pitman wrote:
> >
> > ... If you're asking whether we are code compatible with the original
> > Lisp, the answer is no.
>
> Isn't Common Lisp a super set of original Lisp (whatever original
> means)?
No. No more so than Modern English is a superset of Old English.
> Asked another way: What in "original" Lisp won't run in Common Lisp?
A lot of it. Even more of it if you care whether the result is the same.
That is, there are probably operators with subtlely different semantics.
For example, (APPEND X '()) used to be a way to copy a list in MACLISP
(which isn't even the oldest lisp but is next back in the chain) but today
we say it's permitted to not copy since we have COPY-LIST. That means
(APPEND X '()) will run, but will yield a different result. There are
probably numerous operators in this general camp.
> (Or: What code from a pre 1984 Lisp book won't run in Common Lisp?)
To be clear, there are about 26 years of pre-1984 lisp and only 17 years
of post-1984 lisp. So you're not exactly asking about "original" Lisp.
Common Lisp originated (or, at least, was first published) in 1984. The
task (and some draft editions) started around 1980. But CL has been
comparatively stable. Most of it is the same, but there are a few notable
incompatible changes. Common Lisp arose because Lisp used to change its
semantics about every week. In many ways, I thought of it less as a language
and more as an evolving tool library prior to CL.
> Here is an example of an incompatible change: ANSI forth changed the
> definition of true and false from the older fig-forth definition. ;)
ANSI CL changed a number of things incompatibly from CLTL1.
The definition of what a function is was materially changed. In CLTL,
a list whose car was LAMBDA counted as a function, for example. No
longer. A number of functions have been renamed. SPECIAL-FORM-P
became SPECIAL-OPERATOR-P. COMPILER-LET was removed. GET-SETF-METHOD
was renamed to GET-SETF-EXPANSION, and some other related functions
changed too. The type COMMON was eliminated. These aren't the only
changes by any means, but they highlight the fact that not all changes
have been compatible.
CLTL changed lots of things from prior dialects, too. In part because
prior dialects were varied and there was no agreement among them.
Most dialects had SUBST, for example, but nearly all implementations
disagreed on the definition. There were differences in sharing
required/allowed in the result, differences in how list tails were
descended, differences in which types were terminal and which recursed
into, etc. Ditto for EQUAL. Also, nearly all prior dialects of Lisp
except Scheme (which originated around 1978, some 20 years after Lisp
did), were dynamically scoped. CL believed Scheme's experience and
went with lexical over the strong worries of many in the community.
Further, MACLISP defaulted to base-8 numbers unless you used a decimal
point. Common Lisp reasserted base-10 numbers. [Some of us were
tired of bug reports about (+ 5 5) => 12 implying that + was broken.]
CL also added fancy argument processing (the &keywords) that had been
present only in the latter days of MACLISP and on the Lisp Machine.
CL eliminated FEXPR's (a.k.a. "e on the Lisp Machine or NLAMBDA
in interlisp) in favor of ubiquitous macro use.
MACLISP changed continuously in all manner of weird ways that are hard
to even describe unless you already knew the language. Most changes I
can think of would be impossible to describe without describing the very
different language that MACLISP was.
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> Jeff Sandys <·······@juno.com> writes:
>
> > Asked another way: What in "original" Lisp won't run in Common Lisp?
>
> A lot of it. Even more of it if you care whether the result is the same.
> That is, there are probably operators with subtlely different semantics.
> For example, (APPEND X '()) used to be a way to copy a list in MACLISP
> (which isn't even the oldest lisp but is next back in the chain) but today
> we say it's permitted to not copy since we have COPY-LIST. That means
> (APPEND X '()) will run, but will yield a different result. There are
> probably numerous operators in this general camp.
Oops. Don't you mean (APPEND '() X) ?
CL-USER(1): (setq x '(1 2 3))
(1 2 3)
CL-USER(2): (eq x (append x '()))
NIL
CL-USER(3): (eq x (append '() x))
T
CL-USER(4):
Permission (in fact, mandate) to not copy applies to the last argument
only, as I read it.
--
Duane Rettig Franz Inc. http://www.franz.com/ (www)
1995 University Ave Suite 275 Berkeley, CA 94704
Phone: (510) 548-3600; FAX: (510) 548-8253 ·····@Franz.COM (internet)
Kent Pitman wrote:
[Jeff Sandys asked:]
> > Isn't Common Lisp a super set of original Lisp (whatever original
> > means)?
[KMP:]
> No. No more so than Modern English is a superset of Old English.
(with-quibbling
Middle English, I'd say. A reasonably linguistically
aware speaker of Modern English can read (e.g.) Chaucer but
it's heavy going and every now and then they'll have to look
some words up. Faced with "Beowulf" they'd be almost completely
helpless without a considerable amount of outside help. I think
programs written in LISP 1.5 or original McCarthy LISP are
more like Chaucer than like "Beowulf".)
--
Gareth McCaughan ················@pobox.com
.sig under construc
* Jeff Sandys <·······@juno.com>
| Isn't Common Lisp a super set of original Lisp (whatever original means)?
No. Just as the music that can be described by the note system is not a
superset of original music (whatever that means).
Your question implies that no mistakes were made in "original Lisp", no
tradeoffs would need to be revisited.
///
--
The past is not more important than the future, despite what your culture
has taught you. Your future observations, conclusions, and beliefs are
more important to you than those in your past ever will be. The world is
changing so fast the balance between the past and the future has shifted.
Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
> * Jeff Sandys <·······@juno.com>
> | Isn't Common Lisp a super set of original Lisp (whatever original means)?
>
> No. Just as the music that can be described by the note system is not a
> superset of original music (whatever that means).
>
> Your question implies that no mistakes were made in "original Lisp", no
> tradeoffs would need to be revisited.
The one I'm most glad got fixed was that whole not implementing EVAL
thing... :-)
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
From: Jeff Sandys
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <3C0E5482.9C313150@juno.com>
zaphod wrote:
> 1) doesn't common lisp somewhat break from the spirit of the origonal
> lisp definition, and am I wrong to suspect that that is the real main
> reason for the popularity fo scheme (a little more faithfullness to
> the origonal idea)?
Is your goal to do a Markov chains project or preserve the original
spirit of Lisp? If your goal is the project, the object oriented
methods and other modern features in Common Lisp will be very useful
for achieving your goal.
> 2) does anyone know whether or not the mulisp for the apple, back in
> 83 was the same mulisp you can find now? It seems like they are just
> coincidentally the same names, with nothing further in common.
The current muLisp as marketed by Texas Instruments is an up to date
PC version of the older muLisp for Apple II and CP/M. MuLisp does
not meet the Common Lisp standard but there is an objects package
for it.
> 4) Where can I get ahold of McCarthy's recursion paper?
Many of his papers are on his web site:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/index.html
> 7) Compare lisp to forth.
My view based on my experience:
Lisp forth
prefix postfix
high level of abstraction low level of abstraction
write, read and re-write write once, read never
automatic memory management manual memory management
data as programs, easy data as programs, hard
recursion is easy and used recursion is difficult and avoided
good for problem solving good for control systems
You can make a You can make a
forth interpreter in Lisp Lisp interpreter in forth
Thanks,
Jeff Sandys
Jeff Sandys <·······@juno.com> wrote in message news:<·················@juno.com>...
> zaphod wrote:
> > 1) doesn't common lisp somewhat break from the spirit of the origonal
> > lisp definition, and am I wrong to suspect that that is the real main
> > reason for the popularity fo scheme (a little more faithfullness to
> > the origonal idea)?
>
> Is your goal to do a Markov chains project or preserve the original
> spirit of Lisp?
Good point. I got caught up in a story. I chose lisp based on rather
arbitrary reasons. The successor(s) to snobol 4 might be more suited
in some way's, but the master handbook does not "do" snobol. Then I
got cought up in the fact that lisp and forth are the 2 cultiest
languages from the points of view of the people I've read. I Love
lore. It's a disease I cannot cure myself of. By the way, is there
anything that common lisp cannot do, that the origonal lisp could (I'm
guessing an obviouse no.)
If your goal is the project, the object oriented
> methods and other modern features in Common Lisp will be very useful
> for achieving your goal.
>
> > 2) does anyone know whether or not the mulisp for the apple, back in
> > 83 was the same mulisp you can find now? It seems like they are just
> > coincidentally the same names, with nothing further in common.
>
> The current muLisp as marketed by Texas Instruments is an up to date
> PC version of the older muLisp for Apple II and CP/M. MuLisp does
> not meet the Common Lisp standard but there is an objects package
> for it.
>
> > 4) Where can I get ahold of McCarthy's recursion paper?
>
> Many of his papers are on his web site:
> http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/index.html
>
> > 7) Compare lisp to forth.
>
> My view based on my experience:
> Lisp forth
> prefix postfix
> high level of abstraction low level of abstraction
> write, read and re-write write once, read never
> automatic memory management manual memory management
> data as programs, easy data as programs, hard
> recursion is easy and used recursion is difficult and avoided
> good for problem solving good for control systems
> You can make a You can make a
> forth interpreter in Lisp Lisp interpreter in forth
>
So, almost no relation. I guessed wrong.
My basic impression was that forth was like a cross between Lisp, C,
and a bummer acid trip (I could give reasons, but they would be based
on no real knowledge at all.).
> Thanks,
> Jeff Sandys
From: Hannah Schroeter
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <9unov9$2ep$2@news.schlund.de>
Hello!
In article <····························@posting.google.com>,
zaphod <······@ureach.com> wrote:
>[...]
>My basic impression was that forth was like a cross between Lisp, C,
>and a bummer acid trip (I could give reasons, but they would be based
>on no real knowledge at all.).
Do you have experience with all those three so that you can say that? *g*
Kind regards,
Hannah.
······@schlund.de (Hannah Schroeter) wrote in message news:<············@news.schlund.de>...
> Hello!
>
> In article <····························@posting.google.com>,
> zaphod <······@ureach.com> wrote:
> >[...]
>
> >My basic impression was that forth was like a cross between Lisp, C,
> >and a bummer acid trip (I could give reasons, but they would be based
> >on no real knowledge at all.).
>
> Do you have experience with all those three so that you can say that? *g*
No (I think I recognise *g* as grin). I have only read about the
first 2(and seen some large sample programs and small sample
programs), and bummer acid trips go rather off topic! *g*. I thought
I had made clear that this was a first impression.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Hannah.
······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message news:<····························@posting.google.com>...
> ... lisp and forth are the 2 cultiest
> languages from the points of view of the people I've read.
I would rather list forth and APL as the two cultiest.
LISP can do mainstream stuff such as WebServer applications.
I've heard Yahoo Stores is written in LISP, and I have a demo in LISP:
http://shell.tsoft.com/~rem/cgi-bin/topscript.cgi
Does anybody know of any WebServer applications, either commercial
like Yahoo or personal demo like mine, that are written in forth?
> ... It's a disease I cannot cure myself of. By the way, is there
> anything that common lisp cannot do, that the origonal lisp could (I'm
> guessing an obviouse no.)
My guess:
It can't run on a machine with such a tiny amount of memory available.
More specifically, there's a range of size of machine (total memory,
RAM and disk etc.) on which you can install an early LISP and have
all the original utilities of LISP avaialble to your use via keyboard,
but it is not possible to install Common LISP likewise on that machine
because it has too many different defined utilities to fit in memory.
(I use the word "utilities" here to mean functions, macros, special
forms, data types, etc. etc. everything available to users/programmers.)
·······@Yahoo.Com wrote in message news:<····························@posting.google.com>...
> ······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message news:<····························@posting.google.com>...
> > ... lisp and forth are the 2 cultiest
> > languages from the points of view of the people I've read.
>
> I would rather list forth and APL as the two cultiest.
I very much meant to have said that Lisp and Forth HAVE BEEN the 2
cultiest languages. It probably never occured to any of you that some
people might like that in a language if it's done for what could well
be or is the right reason. It looks as tho common lisp has gotten
totally General Purposey. That might not be a good thing for someone
who's actually looking for a culty language and/or eccentric
programming language.
> LISP can do mainstream stuff such as WebServer applications.
> I've heard Yahoo Stores is written in LISP, and I have a demo in LISP:
> http://shell.tsoft.com/~rem/cgi-bin/topscript.cgi
> Does anybody know of any WebServer applications, either commercial
> like Yahoo or personal demo like mine, that are written in forth?
>
> > ... It's a disease I cannot cure myself of. By the way, is there
> > anything that common lisp cannot do, that the origonal lisp could (I'm
> > guessing an obviouse no.)
>
> My guess:
> It can't run on a machine with such a tiny amount of memory available.
> More specifically, there's a range of size of machine (total memory,
> RAM and disk etc.) on which you can install an early LISP and have
> all the original utilities of LISP avaialble to your use via keyboard,
> but it is not possible to install Common LISP likewise on that machine
> because it has too many different defined utilities to fit in memory.
> (I use the word "utilities" here to mean functions, macros, special
> forms, data types, etc. etc. everything available to us
In article <····························@posting.google.com>, zaphod wrote:
>·······@Yahoo.Com wrote in message news:<····························@posting.google.com>...
>> ······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message news:<····························@posting.google.com>...
>> > ... lisp and forth are the 2 cultiest
>> > languages from the points of view of the people I've read.
>>
>> I would rather list forth and APL as the two cultiest.
>
>I very much meant to have said that Lisp and Forth HAVE BEEN the 2
>cultiest languages. It probably never occured to any of you that some
>people might like that in a language if it's done for what could well
>be or is the right reason. It looks as tho common lisp has gotten
>totally General Purposey. That might not be a good thing for someone
>who's actually looking for a culty language and/or eccentric
>programming language.
Arguably, someone who's looking for a ``culty'' or eccentric language
probably has no idea what is good for him or her.
``Suitability as medication for a mental illness'' would be near
the bottom of my list of criteria for a programming language.
But then I'm a programmer; a psychiatrist's list will likely
rank this capability nearer to the top.
······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message news:<···························@posting.google.com>...
> 7)Compare lisp to forth.
forth is, to a first approximation, merely LISP restricted to a fixed
number of arguments for each function, written backwards, with all
the parentheses removed so you have no protection against total
disasters caused by getting the wrong number of arguments to some
function so it gobbles an argument meant for another function which
in turn gobbles an argument meant for the next function on the stack
etc. all the way to the end of the stack until inscrutable disaster occurs.
(Obviously I much prefer LISP.)
A big difference between forth and Common LISP is that forth has
just an absolutly basic set of primitives for machine-level operations,
with no built-in support for anything powerful, you have to re-invent
the wheel if you want a garbage collector or hashing or anything else
interesting, whereas Common LISP has more than ten different kinds of
data types (and several specific types within each kind of type), and
has built-in virtually all the utilities that are obviously useful
within each data type and to convert in obvious ways between different
data types, so you need to invent your own utilities only for non-obvious
tasks or application-specific tasks. For example, with any kind of
sequence (strings, lists, vectors of objects, etc.) you can search for
a particular element, or a particular kind of element, or even a sub-
sequence of elements, and get back the index of the first or last such,
in the whole string (from very start or end) or picking up where you
left off before etc.
·······@Yahoo.Com wrote in message news:<····························@posting.google.com>...
> ······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message news:<···························@posting.google.com>...
> > 7)Compare lisp to forth.
>
> forth is, to a first approximation, merely LISP restricted to a fixed
> number of arguments for each function, written backwards, with all
> the parentheses removed so you have no protection against total
> disasters caused by getting the wrong number of arguments to some
> function so it gobbles an argument meant for another function which
> in turn gobbles an argument meant for the next function on the stack
> etc. all the way to the end of the stack until inscrutable disaster occurs.
> (Obviously I much prefer LISP.)
>
> A big difference between forth and Common LISP is that forth has
> just an absolutly basic set of primitives for machine-level operations,
> with no built-in support for anything powerful, you have to re-invent
> the wheel if you want a garbage collector or hashing or anything else
> interesting, whereas Common LISP has more than ten different kinds of
> data types (and several specific types within each kind of type), and
> has built-in virtually all the utilities that are obviously useful
> within each data type and to convert in obvious ways between different
> data types, so you need to invent your own utilities only for non-obvious
> tasks or application-specific tasks.
So then, I'm guessing that in some way's forth looks more like lisp
1.5 than does CL. It seems to me from my very limmited knowledge base
that saying that a language does not come with a library of primitives
and functions, does not mean that you have to reinvent the wheel,
since sub-routine lybraries are about as old as Fortran, at least.
For example, with any kind of
> sequence (strings, lists, vectors of objects, etc.) you can search for
> a particular element, or a particular kind of element, or even a sub-
> sequence of elements, and get back the index of the first or last such,
> in the whole string (from very start or end) or picking up where you
> left off before etc.
······@ureach.com (zaphod) wrote in message news:<····························@posting.google.com>...
> So then, I'm guessing that in some way's forth looks more like lisp
> 1.5 than does CL.
When I said "to a first approximation" I was referring to the
functional application syntax, which is (function arg arg ... arg)
in LISP but arg art art ... arg function in FORTH. That's pretty
much the same in all versions of LISP.
> It seems to me from my very limmited knowledge base
> that saying that a language does not come with a library of primitives
> and functions, does not mean that you have to reinvent the wheel,
> since sub-routine lybraries are about as old as Fortran, at least.
The attitude of most Fortran programmers was of building libraries to
share. The attitude of most Foth programmers was "if you need anything,
do it yourself". For example, that was their response when I noted
that forth didn't come with a garbage collector and I inquired if
the maintainers of Forth or the community of users had any available.
From: Andreas Bogk
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <87itbdztto.fsf@teonanacatl.andreas.org>
·······@Yahoo.Com writes:
> A big difference between forth and Common LISP is that forth has
> just an absolutly basic set of primitives for machine-level operations,
> with no built-in support for anything powerful, you have to re-invent
To be fair, the strength of Forth is that you can make it work in 4k
of code (or even less), whereas the average CL weighs a few megabytes.
I consider Forth to be the appropriate tool in situations where you
can't get any other interactive system to work. It beats writing
assembler and burning ROMs for every debug cycle by several orders of
magnitude.
Andreas
--
"In my eyes it is never a crime to steal knowledge. It is a good
theft. The pirate of knowledge is a good pirate."
(Michel Serres)
Andreas Bogk <·······@andreas.org> wrote in message news:<··············@teonanacatl.andreas.org>...
> ... the strength of Forth is that you can make it work in 4k
> of code (or even less), whereas the average CL weighs a few megabytes.
Like I said, in the days when memory was expensive, for some applications
it was nice to have something that was interactive and a bit easier to
use than DDT or assembly or binary code and would fit into such a tiny
bit of memory. But those days are over.
Macintosh Allegro CL ran fine in my ONE (1) megabyte of RAM on my
Macintosh Plus, except if I wanted to do major things then the
data filled up memory and it thrashed until it died. When I expanded it
to 2.5 megabytes, then I never again had memory shortages. Maybe the
"average" CL weighs a few megabytes, but that particular version weighed
only one megabyte, and that version plus lots of data plus Finder plus
a couple other programs still was under 2.5 megabytes..
> I consider Forth to be the appropriate tool in situations where you
> can't get any other interactive system to work. It beats writing
> assembler and burning ROMs for every debug cycle by several orders of
> magnitude.
Is there anyone without access to even one megabyte of RAM, even by
connecting to an ISP that has CMUCL, who is forced to do serious debugging
and development work on an isolated 4k-byte computer, without help from
a cross-assembler or cross-compiler or emulator running on a bigger
machine such as a Unix-shell ISP?
> "In my eyes it is never a crime to steal knowledge. It is a good
> theft. The pirate of knowledge is a good pirate."
So breaking into people's homes to steal their passwords and their
credit card numbers and expiration dates, to get the knowledge of what
their passwords and credit-card info are, so you can then forge purchases
on their credit cardsd, is perfectly fine with you? So if somebody does
hard work on a new computer program, and they havne't been paid for it yet,
it's perfectly fine for their employer to steal the program and then
not pay them for their work because after all they already have the
program for free so why pay for it?
You sound almost like Richard Stallman who doesn't believe anybody
should ever be paid to write computer software, that everyone who
wants to write a program should do it for free and just give it
away and starve to death for lack of any income to buy food.
On 6 Jan 2002 ·······@Yahoo.Com wrote:
[snip]
> You sound almost like Richard Stallman who doesn't believe anybody
> should ever be paid to write computer software, that everyone who
> wants to write a program should do it for free and just give it
> away and starve to death for lack of any income to buy food.
This is clearly at *best* a tendentious reading of Stallman. I can
*almost* distort Stallman's view to get this...but it's *quite* the
stretch.
(Since Stallman has *paid* people to write computer software, and, last I
checked, starving to death was *not* among the things he claimed were
virtues or obligatory, your contrual of his believes requires some work.)
(And let's *not* debate it. It's hardly appropriate in this forum. Plus,
it clearly was a gratuitious shot on your part.)
Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.
From: Thomas F. Burdick
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <xcvsn9iklo6.fsf@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU>
Bijan Parsia <·······@email.unc.edu> writes:
> On 6 Jan 2002 ·······@Yahoo.Com wrote:
> [snip]
> > You sound almost like Richard Stallman who doesn't believe anybody
> > should ever be paid to write computer software, that everyone who
> > wants to write a program should do it for free and just give it
> > away and starve to death for lack of any income to buy food.
>
> This is clearly at *best* a tendentious reading of Stallman. I can
> *almost* distort Stallman's view to get this...but it's *quite* the
> stretch.
No, I'd say it's nowhere anywhere near his views, at least how he
spells them out in his essays. He certainly encourages people to
share software that they made without being paid, because some people
*will* always create software, money or no. But he also advocates the
government, or non-profits, or something, paying people to write
software because software authors should get paid. He just disagrees
with most people on the how, and to a certain extent on the why.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
From: Brian P Templeton
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <87itadczjw.fsf@tunes.org>
···@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> Bijan Parsia <·······@email.unc.edu> writes:
>
>> On 6 Jan 2002 ·······@Yahoo.Com wrote:
>> [snip]
>> > You sound almost like Richard Stallman who doesn't believe anybody
>> > should ever be paid to write computer software, that everyone who
>> > wants to write a program should do it for free and just give it
>> > away and starve to death for lack of any income to buy food.
>>
>> This is clearly at *best* a tendentious reading of Stallman. I can
>> *almost* distort Stallman's view to get this...but it's *quite* the
>> stretch.
>
> No, I'd say it's nowhere anywhere near his views, at least how he
> spells them out in his essays. He certainly encourages people to
> share software that they made without being paid, because some people
> *will* always create software, money or no. But he also advocates the
> government, or non-profits, or something, paying people to write
> software because software authors should get paid. He just disagrees
> with most people on the how, and to a certain extent on the why.
>
Actually, he isn't anti-commercial either; he diagrees mostly with
proprietary software. In fact, the GNU GPL specifically allows
developers to make money on their software. (Again, that's according
to his essays, etc.)
(However, I think he encourages making money through consulting work
to write software more than by selling software.)
> --
> /|_ .-----------------------.
> ,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
> ,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
> / / `-----------------------'
> ( -. |
> | ) |
> (`-. '--.)
> `. )----'
--
BPT <···@tunes.org> /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign
backronym for Linux: \ / No HTML or RTF in mail
Linux Is Not Unix X No MS-Word in mail
Meme plague ;) ---------> / \ Respect Open Standards
In article <····························@posting.google.com>,
·······@Yahoo.Com wrote:
>Andreas Bogk <·······@andreas.org> wrote in message news:<··············@teonanacatl.andreas.org>...
>> "In my eyes it is never a crime to steal knowledge. It is a good
>> theft. The pirate of knowledge is a good pirate."
>
>So breaking into people's homes to steal their passwords and their
>credit card numbers and expiration dates, to get the knowledge of what
>their passwords and credit-card info are, so you can then forge purchases
>on their credit cardsd, is perfectly fine with you?
Idiot, can you not see the difference? This is personal, private information.
It isn't ``knowledge'' in any sense of the word.
Firstly, entering into someone's home is a crime in itself, even if
nothing is taken. That's because the likely purpose of entering is
to commit a crime, whether it be to take something or to harm someone.
Copying a credit card number is a crime because the only likely use
of that information is to commit fraud, not because the digits
are copyrighted.
Fraud harms the owner of the credit card; the thief avails himself of
goods and services using the card, and the credit card owner, or the
credit card company, are stuck with the bill. Get it? Something is
taken which is then unavailable to the owner.
>So if somebody does
>hard work on a new computer program, and they havne't been paid for it yet,
>it's perfectly fine for their employer to steal the program and then
>not pay them for their work because after all they already have the
>program for free so why pay for it?
It's not fine, because it's a breach of contract. It's no different from
failing to compensate a worker for any kind of labor, and as such, the
issue has nothing to do with copying.
What you are forgetting is that the employer *already* owns the
program. If it is a typical software development corporation, it has a
contract filed away, signed by the employee, that all works produced by
the employee belong to the employer. So by definition, the employer cannot
steal the software. What the employer can steal is the employee's *time*.
>You sound almost like Richard Stallman who doesn't believe anybody
>should ever be paid to write computer software, that everyone who
>wants to write a program should do it for free and just give it
>away and starve to death for lack of any income to buy food.
Where does Stallman say this? There is a ``philosophy'' section at the
www.fsf.org web site. Can you make a citation from there which supports
your assertion? You should avoid simplifying the positions of people
you disagree with, and in particular avoid doing so behind their backs
when you are not actually arguing with them.
From: Nicolas Neuss
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <87r8oz4zwu.fsf@ortler.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de>
Andreas Bogk <·······@andreas.org> writes:
> ·······@Yahoo.Com writes:
>
> > > "In my eyes it is never a crime to steal knowledge. It is a good
> > > theft. The pirate of knowledge is a good pirate."
> > So breaking into people's homes to steal their passwords and their
> > credit card numbers and expiration dates, to get the knowledge of what
> > their passwords and credit-card info are, so you can then forge purchases
> > on their credit cardsd, is perfectly fine with you?
>
> I think we have to distinguish between information and knowledge here.
> Passwords and credit card numbers are just information, they don't
> have any intrinsic value themselves. Knowledge is a level above that:
> it is the result of a cognitive process based on information.
>
> Apart from that: forged purchases are the crime, stealing the credit
> card number itself is not.
>
> By the way, you have deleted the attribution of this quote. Look up
> Michel Serres on google, he's not just somebody, but a well-respected
> french philosopher, specialized in the philosophy of sciences.
Would you please give us the precise context in which Serres made this
statement? I have mailed you privately that I would not like this
citation (which did not help), and I see that I'm not the only one. I
think it would be a quite perfect slogan for every secret service in
the world, and I can't imagine that Serres wanted to imply such
meaning[1]. He probably would not be happy with your signature.
Nicolas.
[1] I remember you saying that you are from East Germany (GDR). Is
that correct? Please note that your signature would also be a nice
slogan for the Stasi variant there, where half the population spied on
the other half. I therefore suggest that you really should drop this
citation.
From: Andreas Bogk
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <874rlvy23w.fsf@teonanacatl.andreas.org>
Nicolas Neuss <·····@ortler.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de> writes:
> > By the way, you have deleted the attribution of this quote. Look up
> > Michel Serres on google, he's not just somebody, but a well-respected
> > french philosopher, specialized in the philosophy of sciences.
> Would you please give us the precise context in which Serres made this
> statement?
Sure. It was in an interview conducted by Frank Hartmann and Bernhard
Rieder for the online magazine Telepolis. The URL is:
http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/3602/1.html
> I have mailed you privately that I would not like this
> citation (which did not help), and I see that I'm not the only one. I
> think it would be a quite perfect slogan for every secret service in
> the world, and I can't imagine that Serres wanted to imply such
> meaning[1]. He probably would not be happy with your signature.
It explicitly refers to scientific knowledge, and not to violation of
privacy. Unfortunately I cannot put the whole interview into four
lines of signature, so there's room for ambiguity, but this can be
easily resolved by research on the author.
I am sure that Serres meant to provoke, so I think he'd be happy with
the quotation. But I will contact him, and ask (his son-in-law
happened to be one of the judges in the ICFP 2001 programming
contest).
> [1] I remember you saying that you are from East Germany (GDR). Is
> that correct?
That's correct, yes.
> Please note that your signature would also be a nice
> slogan for the Stasi variant there, where half the population spied on
> the other half. I therefore suggest that you really should drop this
> citation.
It refers to scientific knowledge, which is something entirely
different than information about the private life of people. So I
will keep it.
By the way: with the new wiretapping and anti-terrorism laws, it's
harder and harder for me to see the difference between the Stasi and
our current government. And this is not a good development.
But I guess this is getting way off-topic for a Lisp newsgroup...
Andreas
--
"In my eyes it is never a crime to steal knowledge. It is a good
theft. The pirate of knowledge is a good pirate."
(Michel Serres)
Andreas Bogk <·······@andreas.org> writes:
> > Would you please give us the precise context in which Serres made this
> > statement?
>
> Sure. It was in an interview conducted by Frank Hartmann and Bernhard
> Rieder for the online magazine Telepolis. The URL is:
>
> http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/3602/1.html
Thanks for the link. Unfortunately, it is a German text so not all
cll members can enjoy it.
> I am sure that Serres meant to provoke, so I think he'd be happy with
> the quotation.
I doubt that. Note that it is not even a precise quotation, because
you have translated a translated version and omitted a sentence in
between. But when you really ask him, we'll see...
Bye, Nicolas.
From: Brian P Templeton
Subject: Re: Serres quotation (Was: Re: know notyhing student of lisp...)
Date:
Message-ID: <87g05cjm15.fsf@tunes.org>
Nicolas Neuss <·····@ortler.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de> writes:
> Andreas Bogk <·······@andreas.org> writes:
>
>> > Would you please give us the precise context in which Serres made this
>> > statement?
>>
>> Sure. It was in an interview conducted by Frank Hartmann and Bernhard
>> Rieder for the online magazine Telepolis. The URL is:
>>
>> http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/3602/1.html
>
> Thanks for the link. Unfortunately, it is a German text so not all
> cll members can enjoy it.
>
You can use Altavista's Babelfish service so you can be miserable
while trying to read the poor translation :).
>> I am sure that Serres meant to provoke, so I think he'd be happy with
>> the quotation.
>
> I doubt that. Note that it is not even a precise quotation, because
> you have translated a translated version and omitted a sentence in
> between. But when you really ask him, we'll see...
>
> Bye, Nicolas.
--
BPT <···@tunes.org> /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign
backronym for Linux: \ / No HTML or RTF in mail
Linux Is Not Unix X No MS-Word in mail
Meme plague ;) ---------> / \ Respect Open Standards
Andreas Bogk <·······@andreas.org> wrote in message news:<··············@teonanacatl.andreas.org>...
> It explicitly refers to scientific knowledge, and not to violation of
> privacy.
But you posted it in this thread in the context of somebody choosing
between forth and lisp for developing computer software, not in a
context of somebody making a scientific discovery and deciding whether
to keep it secret or share it. Accordingly I assumed it was meant to
apply to computer software and other works of labor, not to scientific
knowledge about nature in general.
I agree that **scientific** knowledge should, in general, be shared with
everyone. But **theft** in general, not scientific, but software, personal
passwords, etc., is immoral, unfair upon the person whose privacy was
violated or whose labor was taken without compensation. IMO you should have
included some disclaimer that clearly indicated it applied to scientific
knowledge only, not to the current topic of discussion, or not included
that quote at all in this thread.
As for the question whether actual theft of scientific knowledge is
moral or not, I still disagree: Scientific knowledge should be
given freely rather than withheld by one person and stolen by another,
but that's off-topic for this newsgroup so I'll not press the issue further.
> Unfortunately I cannot put the whole interview into four
> lines of signature, so there's room for ambiguity, but this can be
> easily resolved by research on the author.
A single (parenthesized) word would have been sufficient to let me know
you were refering to scientific knowledge rather than *any* knowledge
including knowledg eof somebody else's computer-programming work or
login passwords etc. Given that the word "theft" was used, this establishes
a legal context, and in such context the word "knowledge" means any
information whatsoever, not only "higher" forms of knowledge. If the
judge asks "did you have any knowledge of the defendent's plans to commit
the crime prior to the act", and the witness in fact had information as
to that, it is not fair for the witness to answer "no" just because his
information didn't constitute a higher understanding of the overall crime
situation and motivation. So it was perfectly reasonable in that context
for me to assume that somebody's login password or ATM PIN being stolen
would be within the scope of the blanket theft-of-knowledge-is-fine quote.
> It refers to scientific knowledge, which is something entirely
> different than information about the private life of people. So I
> will keep it.
But please don't post it again in a context of developing computer
software without some addition that lets readers know it does *not*
refer to knowledge of somebody's software work.
Google won't let me post a direct followup to this article:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=xcvsn9iklo6.fsf%40conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU
:so I'll have to post my rsponse some other place in the thread.
Regarding Richard Stallman's philosophy against commercial software development:
<<From: ···@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick)
He certainly encourages people to share software that they
made without being paid, because some people *will* always
create software, money or no. But he also advocates the
government, or non-profits, or something, paying people to
write software because software authors should get paid.>>
Unfortunately that leaves me falling through the cracks,
unable to earn a living by programming. The government
hasn't provided grants for Stanford to hire me to program on
their projects for more than ten years, hasn't *ever*
provided any other company with money for me, nor *ever*
provided me money directly, so the government paying me to
program is not an option for me. I've been unable to find
any non-profit willing to hire me for programming, or even
to look (for free, no cost or obligation) at my WebServer
(CGI/CMUCL) demo (*) of some tiny part of what I can do, so
non-profits paying me isn't an option either. So Stallman is
basically saying I shouldn't get paid at all then. I've
found only two local recruiters at employment agencies
willing to even look at my demo, one at Volt who really
liked my demo but his agency hires only for MIcro$oft which
has had no employment openings for more than one year
despite opening a new office just a half mile from where I
live, and one at another agency who thought he might have
two leads a year ago, one for Sun Microsystems and one for
an in-house project, but both of those fizzled because of
the recession which has been on for more than a year. But I
suppose Stallman would say it was wrong for me to go to an
employment agency to look for leads to a job. Instead he
probabaly thinks I should just sit on my butt working ten
hours per day for free and just giving all my software away
for free until the government magically comes to my rescue,
after the Sahara Desert freezes over most likely.
* http://shell.rawbw.com/~rem/cgi-bin/topscript.cgi
By the way, I decided we need an AsciiArt image of the
clover key on a macintosh, so a few minutes ago I created:
http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/Macintosh.Key.Clover.AsciiArt.txt
Is there a master database of ASCII art with WebServer
search engine where for example I could quickly find where
somebody already did the same thing or better?
Google won't let me post a direct followup to this article either:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=87itadczjw.fsf%40tunes.org
:so I'm tacking it on here.
<<From: Brian P Templeton <···@tunes.org>
he isn't anti-commercial either; he diagrees mostly with
proprietary software. ... (However, I think he encourages
making money through consulting work to write software more
than by selling software.)>>
That would be nice if anyone were willing to pay for
consulting work to develop software to then just be given
away for free, but that ain't reality mister.
What does Stallman think about not selling softare but
leasing/renting it out via WebServer applications? Does he
believe it's wrong to force people to pay for use of
software that I developed at my own expense and through my
own efforts, and hence it's perfectly right for somebody to
break into my ISP's computer to copy my software to avoid
the usage fees, because after all my software belongs to the
world not to me personally?
Until and unless there actually does exist some funding to
pay me for my labor producing new software, I will consider
all of Stallman's remarks (*), and all the remarks of his
apologists here in the newsgroup (*), to be personal attacks
against me ever having any means of living.
* (wherein I'm not supposed to earn money this way and not
supposed to earn money that way, leaving me with no idea how
I will ever earn money until the day my credit-card limit is
exceeded and I can no longer pay the rent and become
homeless and die of hypothermia within a week because I
suffer from a faulty metabolism where I go into hypothermic
shock if the room temperature is lower than about 77F when
I'm tired or low on blood sugar due to hypoglycemia)
By the way, are you (Brian P Templeton) related to Brad?
Brad's a nice guy but we have a major disagreement over
information organization and retrieval. He steadfastly
insists on fitting new articles into a set of fixed
categories, whereas I believe storngly that dynamic
clustering of topics with nearest-neighbor and a
cluster-radius hierarchy is better. Is there any grant money
available to fund my implementation of a major demonstration
of dynamic clustering of UseNet newsgroup articles,
presented via CGI/CMUCL of course? Yahoo's tree of Web
search results has taken Brad's approach, and I would like
to get funding to pay for my programming services plus the
online equipment (disk space, WebServer machines running
Unix with CMUCL, and a Unix sysadmin to keep the machines
maintained), and some junior programmers to help with the
LISP coding and alpha-testing, so that I can present a
viable alternative so that Web users can direclty compare
Yahoo's method with my "Generalized Computer Dating"
approach. I might go ahead and develop a small demo of GCD
myself without funding, using Google to find all articles
ever posted to misc.misc, starting with the most recent and
working backwards but bringing in all new articles as they
appear, and then clustering as many as will fit on the 5MB
disk space I have available (the articles not in the 5MB,
only my index of them on my own disk space, with links to
Google's archive of them), but there are many other things I
also want to do and also don't have funding for, so whether
this or some other project gets my free time is anyone's
guess depending on what mood I'll be in when I finish
something I'm currently doing for free. An alternate
approach I might try instead, but still within the GCD
paradigm, is to simply make a smart front-end for Google's
search engine, where the use types in a sample of text, my
program identifies the best keywords, uses those keywords to
select a bunch of articles from Google, then directly
computes vector-metric distance between the user's sample
and each of the articles to prune the search results down to
those which are overall close to the user's query text. One
simple use of this program would be if you heard a joke but
forgot it somewhat and want to pass the joke to a friend,
you type up the joke as best you remember it, submit it to
my search engine, and voila back comes not only the original
posting of the joke you saw before but all other variations
of the joke which are similar enough, and you can then pick
the best version to show your friend, or combine several
versions to pick the best parts of each version to yield an
even better version than ever posted before. Any funding
available for me to develop that, thereby moving it to first
priority in my life above all the unpaid work?
Another thing I would like to do is set up CAI for CGI/CMUCL
programming. My WebServer application would first teach how
to program in LISP from scratch, for somebody who had never
programmed in *any* language and might even be afraid of
computers and believe programming is "too hard" and LISP is
"impossibly hard", then teach HTML scripting from scratch,
then teach CGI interfacing from my CMUCL library:
http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/CGI-CMUCL.library.txt
:then finally combine that general CGI interfacing with the
actual application my student wrote and voila the whole
world (including the student him/herself) can run that
student's program from their Web browser for the first time.
Is there any funding avaiable for this CAI-LISP/CGI task?
From: Thomas F. Burdick
Subject: Re: know notyhing student of lisp (wanna be) has innitial questions and comments on lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <xcv4rkicvb6.fsf@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU>
·······@Yahoo.Com writes:
> Google won't let me post a direct followup to this article:
> http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=xcvsn9iklo6.fsf%40conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU
> :so I'll have to post my rsponse some other place in the thread.
Perhaps it's trying to enforce some sort of manners -- that article is
over a month old.
> Regarding Richard Stallman's philosophy against commercial software development:
> <<From: ···@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick)
> He certainly encourages people to share software that they
> made without being paid, because some people *will* always
> create software, money or no. But he also advocates the
> government, or non-profits, or something, paying people to
> write software because software authors should get paid.>>
>
> Unfortunately that leaves me falling through the cracks,
> unable to earn a living by programming.
[ Summary of elided text: "I'm a big jackass who can't read" ]
> Until and unless there actually does exist some funding to
> pay me for my labor producing new software, I will consider
> all of Stallman's remarks (*), and all the remarks of his
> apologists here in the newsgroup (*), to be personal attacks
> against me ever having any means of living.
If you have such beef with RMS, why don't you take it up with him?
Speaking for myself, I was just trying to correct what I saw as a
misrepresentation of his views. I'd do the same for Hitler. [There,
I did it, now maybe this thread will die?]. Not that I'm comparing
RMS to Hitler. See, there's this thing that most reasonably
intelligent people do where they try to understand others' views, even
if they don't agree with them. Even if, maybe especially when,
they're violently opposed to them.
Whatever you do, please quit setting up straw men here to rant
against. It's obnoxious.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'