the joke was extended on my Uni course to include "call by reference" but I forget what it was. probably "hey! YOU" -G On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 7:12 AM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 7:01 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: There were (and are!) a whole bunch of dialects of Lisp: Common Lisp and Scheme might be the best known, with Clojure a modern entrant. Arc is sort of a thing. Most folks know about emacs Lisp. All of these derive from the original Lisp. But there were a whole slew of historical dialects descended from Lisp 1.5: MacLisp, InterLisp, FranzLisp, Lisp Machine Lisp, the original variant implemented by Symbolics before they adopted Common Lisp, Portable Standard Lisp...and any number of others that were implemented as extension languages: AutoLisp from AutoCAD, the aforementioned Emacs Lisp, the pseudo-Lisp from Gosling's Emacs, and plenty of others. And how about implementations? VAX Lisp, LispWorks, Allegro, etc. I think the thing is that "Lisp" isn't a single language, but rather a family of languages that all share common features (code is data, macros, etc, etc, etc) with lots of variation between them (I understand that there was serious argument about whether integer literals should be written in octal in Common Lisp, as they were in MacLisp. Somehow common sense prevailed). So, how's this relevant to Unix? Well, I'd like to know more about the historical interplay between the Unix and Lisp communities. What about the Lisp done at Berkeley on the VAX (Franz Lisp). One of the things that strikes me about Lisp and Unix is the conceptual similarity between image based languages (like Lisp) with a REPL and the Unix "process as virtual machine" model with a shell and set of utilities. An image is a sort of virtual machine and a REPL is a sort of shell; callable functions in the REPL are sort of like discrete programs in the $PATH. To a first order approximation, at any rate. So anyway...some of you who were there, was there cross-pollination? Was Franz Lisp a thing Unix people at Berkeley played with, or was it mostly Lisp people who just happened to be using Unix because VAXen were expensive? - Dan C.

On 2018-02-15 8:06 PM, Clem cole wrote: You probably meant "SMP", built by Wolfram and others at Caltech: http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/smp-symbolic-manipulation-progra… It sounds like Mathematica probably did not _directly_ derive from SMP due to a court ruling. "A dispute with the administration over the intellectual property rights regarding SMP—patents, copyright, and faculty involvement in commercial ventures—eventually caused him to resign from Caltech. SMP was further developed and marketed commercially by Inference Corp. of Los Angeles during 1983–1988." Curiously, the above text has been copied and pasted verbatim all over the web and it's not clear where it originated. "SMP was essentially Version Zero of the more ambitious Mathematica system" is also all over the web including Wikipedia. Nowadays we'd just run gcc :) --Toby

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 07:51:14PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: This is just my opinion so there is a grain of salt. Or a salt shaker. I think there are two (at least) sorts of programmers, the systems people and the lisp people. Sometimes you get both kinds in the same person but that tends to be rare (and awesome, I've employeed several of those, they were magic). I'm a systems guy. I've played with lisp, even wrote a tiny lisp (haven't we all?), tried to get to like it and utterly failed. All sorts of smart people I knew in my career loved lisp, sneered at any other language, tended to think in ASTs, etc, etc. I definitely felt inferior and tried to like lisp but just never got what was so neat about it. For good reason, I think. Nobody has written a serious operating system, or a serious $BIG_PROJECT in Lisp. Not one that has been commercially successful, so far as I know. I know there were attempts but all those attempts failed. Why? Performance I think. C performs far better even though it is, in the eyes of lisp people, far more awkward to do things. I can't tell you the number of times I've heard "If we were using Lisp we'd be done by now". 100's, 1000's. What I have never heard is "I recoded this pile of C in lisp and it's 10x faster". I think the thing is that lisp programmers were optimizing for speed of coding and C programmers were optimizing for speed of execution. So I suspect that Franz Lisp was mostly lisp people who happened to be using Unix. But I wasn't at Berkeley so what do I know? --lm

ITA’s airline flight booking system, that was used by Orbitz and others was pretty much entirely written in Common LISP, and it was certainly both large and commercially successful. Orbitz was bought by Google for $700 million. I don’t know how much of the LISP survived sustained attention by Google. Paul Graham’s company Viaweb was all LISP. It was bought by Yahoo! for $50 million and became Yahoo! Store. I think of myself as a systems person and C is still my primary language, but I wrote the routing software for the wacky Kautz graph in the Sicortex machines in Common LISP. It was substantially easier! After it worked I recoded in C for production. It isn’t that Common LISP isn’t perfectly fast enough, we just didn’t want garbage collection at that level of the software. My favorite LISP story is the time I was hired to evaluate a proposed Cryptosystem. I was handed 40 pages of C code. I reimplemented it in 15 (short) lines of Common LISP. It wasn’t hard to crack after it fit on one page! I came to LISP 30 years late because I was in 6-1 at MIT rather than 6-3 so I didn’t learn LISP or Scheme. I am not one of the awesome folks of which you speak, but I’ve met them and know what you mean. One MIT physicist I met thought MILC was too complicated so his quantum chromodynamics code was in LISP. He wrote his own LISP->C translator to get it to generate exactly the code he wanted. -L

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 09:38:02PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: Which is sort of my point. I don't know all the details but lisp and performance is not a thing.

I tried to hire an engineer in the 1990s. She came to the interview with her (probably over-controlling) father who was the founder of the two person consulting company she'd been working for. They coded a huge traffic-light management system entirely in LISP. Major stuff. behaved, she didn't accept. I think she was an incredibly good programmer. Really smart, competent. It was my first clue that out in the "real world" (I was working in a university) you could code in LISP and sell solutions that ran things like traffic lights: People die if you get that wrong. Awesome. (it's equally likely we didn't offer, being stupid) On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 12:51 PM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 09:51:21PM -0500, Toby Thain wrote: I'm fine with your claim but I'd like to see a pile of C code that was rewritten in lisp and it is faster. I'm 99.9% sure that's not a thing. Lisp is fantastic for programmers who know how to use it, which is why so many people are lisp fanatics. But performant it is not. Feel free to show me how I'm wrong, I love being wrong, that's where I learn. --lm

On 2018-02-15 19:51, Dan Cross wrote: I know one of the Franz founders, I'll ask him when I have a chance. -- Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet, if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup. To reply privately _only_ on Usenet and on broken lists which rewrite From, fetch the TXT record for no-use.mooo.com.

On Mon, 23 Apr 2018, Ian Zimmerman wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIFF (I'd post the whole thing, but Warren would probably have my nuts.) -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 12:31 AM, Dan Stromberg <drsalists(a)gmail.com> wrote: ​Indeed - Biff was Heidi's dog.​ ​Hmm, I'm not sure that is fair. Biff just warned Heidi that someone had entered their office​. ᐧ

On 2018-02-15 9:09 PM, Bakul Shah wrote: I'd have said lambda calculus but OK

On Fri, 16 Feb 2018 10:01:36 +0000 Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)tfeb.org> wrote: Tim Bradshaw writes: On the second page of Sussman & Steele's "Scheme, an Interpreter for Extended Lambda Calculus", AI Memo 349, it says "The solution, which Hewitt also uses, is to adopt an ALGOLesque block syntax". And it goes on to describe lexical scoping. They even call it BLOCK! Algol is mentioned a number of times. The discovery of correspondence between actor semantics and lambda calculus was a happy coincidence. From wikipedia article on the history of Scheme: 25 years later, in 1998, Sussman and Steele reflected that the minimalism of Scheme was not a conscious design goal, but rather the unintended outcome of the design process. "We were actually trying to build something complicated and discovered, serendipitously, that we had accidentally designed something that met all our goals but was much simpler than we had intended... we realized that the lambda calculus, a small, simple formalism, could serve as the core of a powerful and expressive programming language." Now you may quibble about "came from" but I think the debt is to Algol or at least Algol related papers. Even the connection to lambda calculus is via Algol (Peter Landin's papers on mechanical evaluation expressions (1964) and formal description of Algol60 (1965)).

On Fri, 16 Feb 2018 12:37:39 +0000 tfb(a)tfeb.org wrote: tfb(a)tfeb.org writes: They did lexical scoping "right", no doubt. But back when Landin first found that lambda calculus was useful for modeling programming languages these concepts were not clearly understood. I do not recall reading anything about whether Algol designers not allowing full lexical scopin was due to an oversight or realizing that efficient implementation of functional argument was not possible. May be Algol's call by name was deemed sufficient? At any rate Algol's not having full lexical scoping does not mean one can simply reject the idea of being influenced by it. Often at the start there is lots of fumbling before people get it right. May be someone should ask Steele? And no, I do not think first class continuations automatically follow from lexical scoping. Go has lexical scoping including closures but no call/cc. The idea of representing future program state as a function I think comes from Strachey, Wadsworth and Reynolds. They used it extensively in denotational semantics to model program behavior. We are just presenting our interpretation of history! Not that anybody cares!

On 16 Feb 2018, at 13:34, Bakul Shah <bakul(a)bitblocks.com> wrote: Yes, I certainly did not mean to imply that Scheme was not influenced by Algol: sorry if my message read that way. What I was arguing against was that Scheme just somehow imported some concepts from Algol into Lisp: it *did* do that, but it also invented (or, at least, implemented in a practical, standardised language) a bunch of new concepts which were *not* present in Algol. You are right of course that someone should ask Steele &co. I think they don't either, but I think that's because we've been talking about two things under one name: scope and extent. What Scheme did was to say that it was going to be a language with lexical scope and indefinite extent, and it was going to take that seriously. Most languages, even ones which purport to be lexically scoped, are usually both not entirely lexically scoped, and only take the indefinite extent thing seriously in sufficiently easy cases if they are. An example of that is Common Lisp (I'm picking CL because CL is my favourite programming language which I've used for a very long time, so I think I'm allowed to be rude about it without causing offence). CL has lexical scope and indefinite extent for variable and function bindings, so it has closures, for instance. But it has dynamic scope and definite extent for condition handlers, for instance, as well as catch tags. And finally it has lexical scope but definite extent for block names and go tags. Scheme has lexical scope and indefinite extent for everything, and takes the attitude that if that makes it hard to implement then fine. And I think that *that* was the new thing that Scheme did. Whether the people designing Scheme knew that at the beginning (and whether their attitude was that rigorous from the beginning) I don't know. (Of course, Scheme also made other Lisp people realise that lexical scope and mostly-indefinite-extent was a better approach than the older dynamic-scope-except-that-compiled-code-is-mostly-lexical horridness. And I think all the Scheme implementations I've used have some mechanism of adding dynamic scope / definite extent for various things, because that's the obviously right scope for, say, condition handlers.) I think this may be off-topic for this list, although I'm enjoying talking about it. --tim

Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: |On Thu, 15 Feb 2018, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: |>> His name is pronounced "vurt" |> |> Maybe some English speakers pronounce it like that. In German it's, |> well, "Wirth". English speakers might write it as "veart", where the |> "ea" is as in the word "hear" or "fear". | |I wasn't giving a pedantic pronunciation lesson; as you pointed out, there |is no direct English equivalent. Hell, the English even pronounce words |differently in different counties (and I should know). Just to add that (Gast)"Wirt"h is an innkeeper, and on the Nikolaus-Day children place shoes in front of their doors so that Nikolaus can put something in (chocolade!, for example). But if you would speak "e" just like "ea" than "Wert"h would surely be "Worth" it, too. I want to affiliate to the colony of thankful who appreciate your messages. Unfortunately i started collecting them just a few months ago and thus missed quite a lot of them. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)

Ian Zimmerman <itz(a)very.loosely.org> wrote: |On 2018-02-15 18:32, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: |> I want to affiliate to the colony of thankful who appreciate your |> messages. Unfortunately i started collecting them just a few months |> ago and thus missed quite a lot of them. | |Not to worry, you'll catch up within a year or so :-P Well, maybe not. And then i have an incomplete archive. |Birthdays and Yahrzeits are strange things to observe. No, i think here you are mistaken. Likely only so if you are either young or moved away from the natural world. I can assure you the remains of biodiversity here where i live currently has a very strong notion of the Jahreszeit. |OB-Unix: when did the "message of the day" mechanism make it into our |favorite system? I do not run a BSD system daily at the moment, my own calendar file is thus unused for a while. Maybe i should write an awk script or so to have it portably available. But still an automated mail by script is something different than spending a minute to write an email to a list. I mean, you can use a drone to deliver flowers to your girl friend, or you can pretty up yourself and bring it in person. That is something very, totally, completely different. And that reminds me of a film with hrhrm Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock some decades ago which joked with that exact difference. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)