Marco Antoniotti <·······@cs.nyu.edu> writes:
> > Wasn't Franz Lisp's compiler called liszt, or am I misremembering?
>
> Yep. That's the case. I remember using a copy of it on a MicroVAX in
> Milan in 1985. :)
All this past tense. :-(
On my PC at home, the command "lisp" still runs Franz Lisp,
and "liszt" runs the compiler - or, rather, a version I wrote
(w/ some help from some others) that compiles to C.
-- Jeff
Jeff Dalton wrote:
> Marco Antoniotti <·······@cs.nyu.edu> writes:
>>>Wasn't Franz Lisp's compiler called liszt, or am I misremembering?
>>
>>Yep. That's the case. I remember using a copy of it on a MicroVAX in
>>Milan in 1985. :)
> All this past tense. :-(
>
> On my PC at home, the command "lisp" still runs Franz Lisp,
> and "liszt" runs the compiler - or, rather, a version I wrote
> (w/ some help from some others) that compiles to C.
I found a lisp general relativity application called sheep. It was
painfully old and I never managed to get it to compile but IIRC it had
references to liszt and worked either using it's own `native' lisp --
like xlisp -- or by using liszt to dump out c that you could then
compile. Could they be related?
:)w
From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: Re: Franz Liszt & Farewell my Dijkstra
Date:
Message-ID: <ey3lm4qspjh.fsf@cley.com>
* Will Deakin wrote:
> I found a lisp general relativity application called sheep. It was
> painfully old and I never managed to get it to compile but IIRC it
> had references to liszt and worked either using it's own `native'
> lisp -- like xlisp -- or by using liszt to dump out c that you could
> then compile. Could they be related?
Sheep is how I discovered Lisp. It has probably run on top of lots of
systems, but at least when I knew it, in the second half of the 80s,
it ran on standard lisp. The way we ran it was to have a Standard
Lisp layer which ran on top of the native Lisp system - in our case
this was Cambridge Lisp, which was, not surprisingly, a Lisp system
done at Cambridge, UK - and then Sheep would run on top of this shim.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were other shims for it which got it
to run on top of other Lisps, such as Franz Lisp. I imagine now it
runs on top of CL, probably still using a Standard Lisp emulation.
Standard Lisp is quite interesting - it's been much more thoroughly
forgotten than InterLisp, but it supported really quite important
applications at the time, such as the Reduce algebra system. Sheep
and Reduce were sort of `friends' - they came out of the same cultures
as each other, though on opposite sides of the Atlantic, I think, as
distinct from the Macsyma culture. There were schemes to let Sheep
use the Reduce simplifier which was better, but the resulting images
were so large (several megabytes...) that it was quite hard to run
them.
I wonder if anyone knows how Sheep got its name?
--tim
Tim Bradshaw <···@cley.com> writes:
> I wonder if anyone knows how Sheep got its name?
Sheep is LAM (Ray d'Inverno's *Lisp Algebraic Manipulator*) grown up.
More details at
http://www.maths.soton.ac.uk/applied/research/AlgCompGR.phtml
Des
almost failed a GR course at Southampton.
--
Des Small, Scientific Programmer,
School of Mathematics, University of Bristol, UK.
From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: Re: Franz Liszt & Farewell my Dijkstra
Date:
Message-ID: <ey3d6q2slly.fsf@cley.com>
* Des Small wrote:
> Sheep is LAM (Ray d'Inverno's *Lisp Algebraic Manipulator*) grown up.
> More details at
> http://www.maths.soton.ac.uk/applied/research/AlgCompGR.phtml
Yes, that's it. Although the url you give doesn't say, LAM originally
ran on the Atlas, and one of its early uses was to calculate the
curvature of the Bondi metric. This had recently been done by hand,
and had taken months (I have the figure 3 months, but I'm not sure if
it was right). LAM took 7 minutes (again, from memory), and *found
bugs* in the manual version. When I was at Southampton, I got a copy
of LAM (which had lost all of its comments and indentation, if it ever
had any), and ported it minimally to run on top of mulisp. I tried to
steal time on an AT that was sitting somewhere, but it went away, so I
eventually set my 8088-based MS-DOS machine (with I think 512k, though
I'm not sure if mulisp could use all that space) to solve the Bondi
metric. It took a very long time (days I think, certainly many hours)
but it did eventually solve it.
--tim
·········@bristol.ac.uk (Dr. Des Small) writes:
> Tim Bradshaw <···@cley.com> writes:
>
> > I wonder if anyone knows how Sheep got its name?
>
> Sheep is LAM (Ray d'Inverno's *Lisp Algebraic Manipulator*) grown up.
I attended Ray d'Inverno's inaugural lecture a year or two ago. He
briefly showed a LAM run, mentioned that it was written in Lisp, asked
the question "Why did I write it in Lisp?" and proceeded to answer it
by saying "one reason is that it is recursive, which means that a
function can call itself", and little else, IIRC. Now, I realize that,
given that it was an inaugral lecture, the audience would not have
been fully appreciative of explanations of the power of Lisp, but I
couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Particularly as some of
those in the audence who were conversant with computers, sniggered at
this point not seeing any reason why he could not have used C.
From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: Re: Franz Liszt & Farewell my Dijkstra
Date:
Message-ID: <ey3elafbzt3.fsf@cley.com>
* Jacek Generowicz wrote:
> I attended Ray d'Inverno's inaugural lecture a year or two ago. He
> briefly showed a LAM run, mentioned that it was written in Lisp, asked
> the question "Why did I write it in Lisp?" and proceeded to answer it
> by saying "one reason is that it is recursive, which means that a
> function can call itself", and little else, IIRC. Now, I realize that,
> given that it was an inaugral lecture, the audience would not have
> been fully appreciative of explanations of the power of Lisp, but I
> couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Particularly as some of
> those in the audence who were conversant with computers, sniggered at
> this point not seeing any reason why he could not have used C.
Well, you have to remember when LAM was written. At the time C wasn't
an available choice. FORTRAN was, but didn't generally support
recursion.
I would have thought that better arguments for Lisp are the fact that
an algebra system spends its entire life allocating and processing
*large* amounts of structured data, often very ephemerally (the
`intermediate expression explosion' problem). You *really* want a
garbage collected language with convenient support for structured data
(in particular the ability to read and write it in textual form.
Additionally you absolutely *must* have correct arithmetic: this means
bignums (probably: you need at least to have detected integer
overflow) and ratios (definitely). I suspect (but am not sure) that
LAM (and SHEEP?) did its own rational numbers.
If you wanted to write an algebra system in C the first thing you'd do
would be to implement great chunks of Lisp.
--tim
Tim wrote:
> I wonder if anyone knows how Sheep got its name?
For my sins, I do. Although it is such a bad joke, I will resist the
temptation to explain...
;)w
Tim Bradshaw <···@cley.com> writes:
> Standard Lisp is quite interesting - it's been much more thoroughly
> forgotten than InterLisp, but it supported really quite important
> applications at the time, such as the Reduce algebra system. ...
Standard Lisp was a good idea: a voluntary standard that didn't need
an implementation of its own because it would be easy to support it in
existing Lisps.
Unfortunately(?), there wasn't enough need for it - at least not
enough FELT need - and it was taken up by only a few.
There was a time when many individuals and groups implemented their
Lisp, used "in house". Some of these were sybstantial systems with
a compiler and documentation. Almost all have now been forgotten,
except by those involved.
The typical approach back then was to invent your own dialect, taking
ideas from whatever other Lisps you knew about and found interesting.
So there was plenty of room for something like Standard Lisp to be
useful - if anyone wanted to have portable code. However, the
attraction of having and using your own Lisp - a Lisp not confined to
the rather limited features of Standard Lisp - was usually greater.
What we might say now is that it should have been a more ambitious
standard (thus more attractive as a language) and have had a
"reference implementation".
The later Portable Standard Lisp (PSL) was more along those lines,
but was still rather pedestrian as a language; and the time when it
would have made sense to have a standard for "ordinary Lisp" was
coming to an end.
One thing that helped end it was the growing prevalence of
Vax + Berkeley Unix as the weapon of choice for university computing;
and Franz Lisp came free with BSD.
So on one hand we had sexy new stuff like lexical scoping and Lisp
machines - which shaped our desires - and on the other we had an
ordinary Lisp, not ideal, but good enough for ordinary purposes, and
available for no work at all.
-- jd
Jeff Dalton <····@todday.aiai.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
+---------------
| There was a time when many individuals and groups implemented their
| Lisp, used "in house". Some of these were sybstantial systems with
| a compiler and documentation. Almost all have now been forgotten,
| except by those involved.
|
| The typical approach back then was to invent your own dialect, taking
| ideas from whatever other Lisps you knew about and found interesting.
|
| So there was plenty of room for something like Standard Lisp to be
| useful - if anyone wanted to have portable code. However, the
| attraction of having and using your own Lisp - a Lisp not confined to
| the rather limited features of Standard Lisp - was usually greater.
+---------------
Oh, you mean like Scheme is today? ;-} ;-}
[...as he rapidly ducks the expected flames. But the description was
just *too* spot-on to ignore.]
+---------------
| What we might say now is that it should have been a more ambitious
| standard (thus more attractive as a language) and have had a
| "reference implementation".
+---------------
Ditto.
-Rob
-----
Rob Warnock, PP-ASEL-IA <····@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue <URL:http://www.rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607
From: Gordon Joly
Subject: Sheep (was Re: Franz Liszt & Farewell my Dijkstra)
Date:
Message-ID: <3db67d9b@212.67.96.135>
In article <···············@cley.com>, Tim Bradshaw <···@cley.com> wrote:
>* Will Deakin wrote:
>> I found a lisp general relativity application called sheep. It was
>> painfully old and I never managed to get it to compile but IIRC it
>> had references to liszt and worked either using it's own `native'
>> lisp -- like xlisp -- or by using liszt to dump out c that you could
>> then compile. Could they be related?
>
>Sheep is how I discovered Lisp. It has probably run on top of lots of
>systems, but at least when I knew it, in the second half of the 80s,
>it ran on standard lisp.
I have Sheep running on RedHat 7.3 (not that I use it much:-).
> The way we ran it was to have a Standard
>Lisp layer which ran on top of the native Lisp system - in our case
>this was Cambridge Lisp, which was, not surprisingly, a Lisp system
>done at Cambridge, UK - and then Sheep would run on top of this shim.
>I wouldn't be surprised if there were other shims for it which got it
>to run on top of other Lisps, such as Franz Lisp. I imagine now it
>runs on top of CL, probably still using a Standard Lisp emulation.
>
>Standard Lisp is quite interesting - it's been much more thoroughly
>forgotten than InterLisp, but it supported really quite important
>applications at the time, such as the Reduce algebra system. Sheep
>and Reduce were sort of `friends' - they came out of the same cultures
>as each other, though on opposite sides of the Atlantic, I think, as
>distinct from the Macsyma culture. There were schemes to let Sheep
>use the Reduce simplifier which was better, but the resulting images
>were so large (several megabytes...) that it was quite hard to run
>them.
>
>I wonder if anyone knows how Sheep got its name?
>
>--tim
It is a simple pun - LAM "grown up".
LAM was the "Lisp Algrebraic Manipulator" written by Ray D'Inverno for
Ph.D. thesis at King's College, London. Sheep was interactive; LAM was
batch processed.
http://www.maths.qmw.ac.uk/hyperspace/sheep.tex.txt
"... Sheep was written largely by Inge Frick of Stockholm (after
information about LAM had been brought to Sweden by Ian Cohen who had
worked with d'Inverno ..."
I contributed code to Sheep as part of my Ph.D. thesis. I never really
used REDUCE much.
Gordo
Gordon Joly wrote:
> I have Sheep running on RedHat 7.3 (not that I use it much:-).
Cool. I should say that I got sheep to run using the cores from the
Queen Mary site under linux. My biggest problem was build it from
source. There was also some comments about porting it to cmucl but I
don't know if anything happened with this.
:)w
On Mon, 21 Oct 2002 20:17:14 +0000 (UTC), Will Deakin
<···········@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I found a lisp general relativity application called sheep. It was
> painfully old and I never managed to get it to compile but IIRC it had
You may have tried to compile it in an inertial frame of reference. Try a
different, possibly non inertial one.
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://www.paoloamoroso.it/ency/README
Paolo Amoroso wrote:
> You may have tried to compile it in an inertial frame of reference. Try a
> different, possibly non inertial one.
I've *have tried* but the rotation of my record player keeps pulling the
plug out of my pc before the build finishes...
;)w
Will Deakin wrote:
>
> Jeff Dalton wrote:
> > Marco Antoniotti <·······@cs.nyu.edu> writes:
> >>>Wasn't Franz Lisp's compiler called liszt, or am I misremembering?
> >>
> >>Yep. That's the case. I remember using a copy of it on a MicroVAX in
> >>Milan in 1985. :)
> > All this past tense. :-(
> >
> > On my PC at home, the command "lisp" still runs Franz Lisp,
> > and "liszt" runs the compiler - or, rather, a version I wrote
> > (w/ some help from some others) that compiles to C.
> I found a lisp general relativity application called sheep. It was
> painfully old and I never managed to get it to compile but IIRC it had
> references to liszt and worked either using it's own `native' lisp --
> like xlisp -- or by using liszt to dump out c that you could then
> compile. Could they be related?
It ran on Portable Standard Lisp. You can get Sheep
here: ftp://ftp.maths.qmw.ac.uk/pub/sheep/linux/
You need all those tarballs, even the logs, before you get it
to compile. It ran fine on my machine last time I tried it.
I had no problems beyond understanding the significance of its
output -- I know General Relativity, but it's a big area, and
it's been years since I've been active in it.
> :)w
Le Hibou
--
Dalinian: Lisp. Java. Which one sounds sexier?
RevAaron: Definitely Lisp. Lisp conjures up images of hippy coders,
drugs,
sex, and rock & roll. Late nights at Berkeley, coding in Lisp fueled by
LSD.
Java evokes a vision of a stereotypical nerd, with no life or social
skills.