Is LISP dying?
Christopher B. Browne
>Andi Kleen <ak...@muc.de> wrote:
>+---------------
>| I would guess there are more Forths than Schemes.
>+---------------
>
>Really??? There are dozens & dozens of Schemes[*] that *I* know of...
>How many Forths are there? Even a dozen?
There were a half-dozen Forths for Atari 8 bit, and about a half-dozen
for Atari ST.
I count 28 distinct implementations at
<http://www.forth.org/compilers.html>, and that list is decidedly not
comprehensive.
--
Lisp Users:
Due to the holiday next Monday, there will be no garbage collection.
cbbr...@ntlug.org- <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
Jerry Avins
>
> On 11 Jul 1999 10:11:19 GMT, Rob Warnock <rp...@rigden.engr.sgi.com> posted:
> >Andi Kleen <ak...@muc.de> wrote:
> >+---------------
> >| I would guess there are more Forths than Schemes.
> >+---------------
> >
> >Really??? There are dozens & dozens of Schemes[*] that *I* know of...
> >How many Forths are there? Even a dozen?
>
> There were a half-dozen Forths for Atari 8 bit, and about a half-dozen
> for Atari ST.
>
> I count 28 distinct implementations at
> <http://www.forth.org/compilers.html>, and that list is decidedly not
> comprehensive.
I have Forth for the AIM-65 in ROM, SYM-1 on tape, and FOCAL (a sort-of
Forth) for KIM-1. Also Aforth standalone for Z-80. Lately, I haven't
seen them on any list.
> --
> Lisp Users:
> Due to the holiday next Monday, there will be no garbage collection.
> cbbr...@ntlug.org- <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
--
Engineering is the art | Let's talk about what
of making what you want | you need; you may see
from things you can get. | how to do without it.
---------------------------------------------------------
Rob Warnock
+---------------
| I have Forth for the AIM-65 in ROM, SYM-1 on tape, and FOCAL (a sort-of
+---------------
Uh... Having ported Doug Wrege's version of PDP-8 FOCAL/F to the PDP-10
Spring 1971, I can say with some confidence that FOCAL isn't even *vaguely*
Forth-like -- it's much closer to JOSS & MUMPS, and in fact, was developed
by Richey Lary following his participation in the first installation of
MUMPS at Mass Gen. While (old, original) MUMPS had "string" as it's only
data type (like Tcl), FOCAL had "floating point" as its only data type.
(In fact, mutable "strings" were emulated with arrays of floating-point
numbers, each array element representing one character.)
Like JOSS & MUMPS & BASIC & FORTRAN -- but unlike Forth -- FOCAL has
traditional infix arithmetic with "the usual" operator priorities,
that is, the assignment "SET A=B+C*4.35-D/2.468" is interpreted as
"SET A=((B+(C*4.35))-(D/2.468))".
-Rob
p.s. My FOCAL-10 port involved some serious rewriting of the internal
FOCAL lexical subroutines SORTC & SORTJ to become two-instruction macros
that made heavy use of the PDP-10 byte pointer stuff and "byte strips"
to encode enumerated character equivalence classes. (Hey, it made it
run 25 times faster!) It used some really hairy "MACRO-10" (the PDP-10
assembler) macros to build those tables at compile time. Imagine my
immense delight when I was exposed to Common Lisp and learned that:
1. The style of table-building I'd been writing in PDP-10 assembler
could be done *much* more naturally -- almost trivially, in fact --
with Lisp macros; and
2. That Common Lisp had preserved at least a little of the flavor of
the PDP-10 variable-sized byte operations... with the same names,
even: LDB, DPB, BYTE, BYTE-SIZE, BYTE-POSITION. Way cool!
I just wish I'd gotten into Lisp 20 years earlier than I did... (*sigh*)
-----
Rob Warnock, 8L-855 rp...@sgi.com
Applied Networking http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
Silicon Graphics, Inc. Phone: 650-933-1673
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. FAX: 650-933-0511
Mountain View, CA 94043 PP-ASEL-IA
Paul Frenger
rp...@rigden.engr.sgi.com (Rob Warnock) wrote:
>Jerry Avins <jya...@erols.com> wrote:
>+---------------
>| I have Forth for the AIM-65 in ROM, SYM-1 on tape, and FOCAL (a sort-of
>| Forth) for KIM-1...
>+---------------
>
>Uh... Having ported Doug Wrege's version of PDP-8 FOCAL/F to the PDP-10
>Spring 1971, I can say with some confidence that FOCAL isn't even *vaguely*
>Forth-like -- it's much closer to JOSS & MUMPS ...
All this LISP/Forth/MUMPS talk reminds me of STOIC, a
Forth-like TIL. It was developed by J. Sachs at MIT in
1977. I recall at Rochester in 1988 that Norman Smith
gave a paper, "STOIC on the DEC VAX", where he talked
about how Roger Hauck of the Smithsonian ported STOIC
to the Vax in 1980. Hmmm ...
The next thing, we'll be discussing PISTOL!
Paul Frenger
Associate Editor (Forth)
ACM Sigplan Notices
Bart Lateur
>Like JOSS & MUMPS & BASIC & FORTRAN -- but unlike Forth -- FOCAL has
>traditional infix arithmetic with "the usual" operator priorities,
>that is, the assignment "SET A=B+C*4.35-D/2.468" is interpreted as
>"SET A=((B+(C*4.35))-(D/2.468))".
This must be totally off-topic, but...
I thought I had read that one of the peculiarities of MUMPS is that the
was NO operator precedence? That everything was just executed from left
to right? That, therefore,
SET A=B+C*4.35-D/2.468
would be interpreted as
SET A=(((B+C)*4.35)-D)/2.468
?
Bart.
Michael Coughlin
> On 11 Jul 1999 10:11:19 GMT, Rob Warnock <rp...@rigden.engr.sgi.com
> posted:
> >Andi Kleen <ak...@muc.de> wrote:
> >+---------------
> >| I would guess there are more Forths than Schemes.
> >+---------------
> >Really??? There are dozens & dozens of Schemes[*] that *I* know of...
> >How many Forths are there? Even a dozen?
> There were a half-dozen Forths for Atari 8 bit, and about a half-dozen
> for Atari ST.
> I count 28 distinct implementations at
> <http://www.forth.org/compilers.html>, and that list is decidedly not
> comprehensive.
There are roughly a hundred versions of Forth that you can
get copies of. If you have a need for a special version of
Forth,
mention it on comp.lang.forth, and somebody will offer to send
you a copy of his unpublished version that he never got around
to
finishing. Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
of
a computer language. Count the number of textbooks on the
shelves
of bookstores intead. I conclude that Lisp and Scheme are still
alive with about half to one third as many books as Fortran,
while Fortran has about one tenth as many books as the big guys
like C, Java, Visual Basic and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
When I meet people who tell me they want to learn all
about computing, including programming, I want to say learn
Forth. But I know that woun't work since they can't even go
to the bookstore and buy a book about it. Well at least they
can still get some nice books about Logo to get then started.
--
Michael Coughlin m-cou...@ne.mediaone.net Cambridge, MA USA
Michael Coughlin
> In article <7meuue$98...@fido.engr.sgi.com>,
> rp...@rigden.engr.sgi.com (Rob Warnock) wrote:
> >Jerry Avins <jya...@erols.com> wrote:
> >+---------------
> >| I have Forth for the AIM-65 in ROM, SYM-1 on tape, and FOCAL (a sort-of
> >| Forth) for KIM-1...
> >+---------------
> >
> >Uh... Having ported Doug Wrege's version of PDP-8 FOCAL/F to the PDP-10
> >Spring 1971, I can say with some confidence that FOCAL isn't even *vaguely*
> >Forth-like -- it's much closer to JOSS & MUMPS ...
> All this LISP/Forth/MUMPS talk reminds me of STOIC, a
> Forth-like TIL. It was developed by J. Sachs at MIT in
> 1977. I recall at Rochester in 1988 that Norman Smith
> gave a paper, "STOIC on the DEC VAX", where he talked
> about how Roger Hauck of the Smithsonian ported STOIC
> to the Vax in 1980. Hmmm ...
Stoic is very clearly a version of Forth. It is unusual
in two respects. Unlike many creatively different versions
of Forth, they decided it was sufficently different to have
a new name. Also it was documented! It is no longer in use
due to a lack of interest. But if anybody wants to find out
more about it, digging thru the old archives will produce
results.
Fernando D. Mato Mira
There are roughly a hundred versions of Forth that you can
get copies of. If you have a need for a special version of
Forth,
mention it on comp.lang.forth, and somebody will offer to send
you a copy of his unpublished version that he never got around
to
finishing. Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
-- ((( DANGER )) LISP BIGOT (( DANGER )) LISP BIGOT (( DANGER ))) Fernando D. Mato Mira Real-Time SW Eng & Networking Advanced Systems Engineering Division CSEM Jaquet-Droz 1 email: matomira AT acm DOT org CH-2007 Neuchatel tel: +41 (32) 720-5157 Switzerland FAX: +41 (32) 720-5720 www.csem.ch www.vrai.com ligwww.epfl.ch/matomira.html
Jerry Avins
>
> Jerry Avins <jya...@erols.com> wrote:
> +---------------
> | I have Forth for the AIM-65 in ROM, SYM-1 on tape, and FOCAL (a sort-of
> | Forth) for KIM-1...
> +---------------
>
> Uh... Having ported Doug Wrege's version of PDP-8 FOCAL/F to the PDP-10
> Spring 1971, I can say with some confidence that FOCAL isn't even *vaguely*
> by Richey Lary following his participation in the first installation of
> MUMPS at Mass Gen. While (old, original) MUMPS had "string" as it's only
> data type (like Tcl), FOCAL had "floating point" as its only data type.
> (In fact, mutable "strings" were emulated with arrays of floating-point
> numbers, each array element representing one character.)
>
> traditional infix arithmetic with "the usual" operator priorities,
> that is, the assignment "SET A=B+C*4.35-D/2.468" is interpreted as
> "SET A=((B+(C*4.35))-(D/2.468))".
>
>
> p.s. My FOCAL-10 port involved some serious rewriting of the internal
> FOCAL lexical subroutines SORTC & SORTJ to become two-instruction macros
> that made heavy use of the PDP-10 byte pointer stuff and "byte strips"
> to encode enumerated character equivalence classes. (Hey, it made it
> run 25 times faster!) It used some really hairy "MACRO-10" (the PDP-10
> assembler) macros to build those tables at compile time. Imagine my
> immense delight when I was exposed to Common Lisp and learned that:
>
> 1. The style of table-building I'd been writing in PDP-10 assembler
> could be done *much* more naturally -- almost trivially, in fact --
> with Lisp macros; and
>
> 2. That Common Lisp had preserved at least a little of the flavor of
> the PDP-10 variable-sized byte operations... with the same names,
> even: LDB, DPB, BYTE, BYTE-SIZE, BYTE-POSITION. Way cool!
>
> I just wish I'd gotten into Lisp 20 years earlier than I did... (*sigh*)
>
> -----
> Rob Warnock, 8L-855 rp...@sgi.com
> Applied Networking http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
> Silicon Graphics, Inc. Phone: 650-933-1673
> 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. FAX: 650-933-0511
> Mountain View, CA 94043 PP-ASEL-IA
Rob,
I remember a Forth-like program I ran on the KIM, sitting at the
teletype in my kid's room working out algorithms to move an NC machine
in arbitrary circular arcs. I remember being annoyed because it seemed
that the major difference from Forth was the renaming of words just to
be different. My recollection that it was called Focal is evidently
faulty. Does anyone know what it might have been? (I had a video RAM on
that KIM, connected to a small TV monitor so I could plot the
trajectories. It was a better machine for my purpose than the mainframe
at work.)
Jerry
Bart Lateur
>I thought I had read that one of the peculiarities of MUMPS is that the
>was NO operator precedence? That everything was just executed from left
>to right? That, therefore,
>
> SET A=B+C*4.35-D/2.468
>
>would be interpreted as
>
> SET A=(((B+C)*4.35)-D)/2.468
>
>?
Somebody suggested (by e-mail) that I must have been thinking about
another language. Well, I looked it up. Here it is:
M[UMPS] by example: operators
http://www.jacquardsystems.com/Examples/operator.htm
I quote:
M[UMPS] evaluates strictly from left to right, so that 1+1*2
yields 4 and not 3.
Bart.
Elizabeth D Rather
>... Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
>of
>a computer language. Count the number of textbooks on the
>shelves
>of bookstores intead. I conclude that Lisp and Scheme are still
>alive with about half to one third as many books as Fortran,
>while Fortran has about one tenth as many books as the big guys
>like C, Java, Visual Basic and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
>
> When I meet people who tell me they want to learn all
>about computing, including programming, I want to say learn
>Forth. But I know that woun't work since they can't even go
>to the bookstore and buy a book about it. Well at least they
>can still get some nice books about Logo to get then started.
Is Amazon a bookstore? Several Forth books there.
Cheers,
Elizabeth
Michael Schuerig
> I conclude that Lisp and Scheme are still
> alive with about half to one third as many books as Fortran,
> while Fortran has about one tenth as many books as the big guys
> like C, Java, Visual Basic and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
So, can you recommend any of those "zero" books? I've never used Forth
and I'm not sure I ever will. I'm much more attracted to languages from
the Lisp family -- nonetheless, my curiousity has slowly grown over the
years.
Michael
--
Michael Schuerig
mailto:schu...@acm.org
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/
Rob Warnock
+---------------+---------------
Thanks for the pinter!
+---------------
| M[UMPS] evaluates strictly from left to right, so that 1+1*2
| yields 4 and not 3.
+---------------
Well, what can I say?!? FOCAL *was* inspired directly by MUMPS, yet
it *did* have operator precedence, for arithmetic exprs at least --
I remember coding that part of FOCAL-10 as direct transliteration
of the FOCAL/F code. There was a separate small data stack for
intermediate results. (And a FOCAL-in-C snarfed off the net some
time ago agrees, too.)
Oh, well...
-Rob
Rob Warnock
+---------------
| M[UMPS] by example: operators
| http://www.jacquardsystems.com/Examples/operator.htm
+---------------
Thanks for the pointer!
Michael Coughlin
> Michael Coughlin <m-cou...@ne.mediaone.net> wrote:
> > I conclude that Lisp and Scheme are still
> > alive with about half to one third as many books as Fortran,
> > while Fortran has about one tenth as many books as the
> > big guys like C, Java, Visual Basic and C++. Forth comes
> > out at zero.
> So, can you recommend any of those "zero" books? I've never
> used Forth and I'm not sure I ever will. I'm much more
> attracted to languages from the Lisp family -- nonetheless,
> my curiousity has slowly grown over the years.
experienced computer user and net surfer. The problem I'm always
complaining about is the lack of Forth instructional material
for complete computer novices. I think this lack of interest in
providing new beginners material lowers the quality and quantity
of tutorial material for all levels of Forth.
The best book I've ever seen on programming for any
language was written for Forth -- "Starting Forth" by Leo
Brodie. Unfortunately this is out of print and available only
thru special order; its not on the shelf of bookstores like it
was for over ten years. There is one new book on Forth for
experienced programmers available from Amazon.com (not
bookstores) and also Forth Inc (http://www.forth.com). Of the
very roughly 100 versions of Forth available for various
computers and operating systems, 10 or 20 have some
documentation that will show how to use Forth for someone who
already knows how to program. The other systems assume that you
have read a book like "Starting Forth" or have learned another
version of Forth and can reverse engineer uncommented Forth
source code. There are several tutorials and articles on the web
that are very good and the amount of material is slowly growing.
See the FAQ for comp.lang.forth for a list. Actually there are
too many web pages for Forth and it is hard to sort thru all of
them to find the ones that tell you exactly what you want to
know. If you don't find what you need, post a message to
comp.lang.forth stating your favorite operating system, cpu and
applications and someone point you to the right place.
Michael Coughlin
> Michael Coughlin wrote in message <378B405C...@ne.mediaone.net>...
> >... Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
> >of a computer language. Count the number of textbooks on
> >as many books as Fortran, while Fortran has about one tenth
> >as many books as the big guys like C, Java, Visual Basic
> >and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
> > When I meet people who tell me they want to learn all
> >about computing, including programming, I want to say learn
> >Forth. But I know that woun't work since they can't even go
> >to the bookstore and buy a book about it. Well at least they
> >can still get some nice books about Logo to get then
> >started.
> Is Amazon a bookstore? Several Forth books there.
Amazon is not a bookstore. You can't drop in and
browse. If you don't know what Forth is, or think that Forth
isn't used anymore, you woun't notice a book about it by
accident when you're looking for some other topic on
programming. You can't just buy a book because you have it
in your hot little hand and it looks interesting. You can't
wrap it up and take it right home. People who don't even have an
account to access amazon.com and the web are the easiest to
influence to at least take a look at Forth. They have not
learned the bad habits of other programming languages and can
immediately appreciate the advantages of Forth.
I just looked for Forth books on amazon.com. Yes there
are several listings. There is only one listed as being in
print, and they say expect delivery within 4 to 6 weeks. There
are also listings for books by Leo Brodie. When I clicked on
"Thinking Forth" I got nothing but a system error. There are
five separate listings for Leo Brodie's book -- "Starting
Forth". That's reasonable since it is at least five times better
than the average book on programming. But its out of print. Its
available only by a special search. It will take them weeks to
find it or tell you if its not available. They don't tell you to
get it faster from the Forth Interest Group in California,
http://www.fig.org/ (at least until their special printing runs
out). Relying on amazon.com to sell Forth textbooks is not a
good thing. It would be better to have a publisher promoting the
book and getting it into bookstores.
Elizabeth Rather is much too shy and modest. She failed to
mention her own book the "Forth Programmers' Handbook". So I'll
tell everyone that it is the one Forth textbook that is in print
and for sale at amazon.com. When I go to my local technical
bookstores to see if it has finally arrived on the shelves (it
hasn't), I find instead books on the equally neglected computer
languages Lisp, Scheme and Logo. I think that Lisp and its
relatives are much more lively than Forth since they still have
recently revised textbooks for sale. Since Forth is still being
used, I can deduce that Lisp is still being used, even tho I
don't know where. But how long will Forth last without at least
a few easily found textbooks?
I wish old Forth programmers would become inspired by Lisp
programmers to write textbooks so they would be able to train
their replacements.
--
Michael Coughlin m-cou...@ne.mediaone.com Cambridge, MA USA
Jerry Avins
> > alive with about half to one third as many books as Fortran,
> > while Fortran has about one tenth as many books as the big guys
> > like C, Java, Visual Basic and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
>
> and I'm not sure I ever will. I'm much more attracted to languages from
> the Lisp family -- nonetheless, my curiousity has slowly grown over the
> years.
>
Look at http://erwin.phys.virginia.edu/classes/551/primer.txt That
should get you started.
Jerry Avins
>
> Elizabeth D Rather wrote:
>
> > Michael Coughlin wrote in message <378B405C...@ne.mediaone.net>...
> > >... Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
> > >of a computer language.
>
> > Is Amazon a bookstore? Several Forth books there.
>
> Amazon is not a bookstore. You can't drop in and
> browse.
> I just looked for Forth books on amazon.com. Yes there
> are several listings. There is only one listed as being in
> print, and they say expect delivery within 4 to 6 weeks.
Amazon always says "4 to 6 weeks", even if they know that the shipment
will arrive tomorrow. Does it take them that long to reprogram their
computer?
...
> --
> Michael Coughlin m-cou...@ne.mediaone.com Cambridge, MA USA
Jerry
euph...@freenet.co.uk
On 1999-07-13 m-cou...@ne.mediaone.net said:
:Stoic is very clearly a version of Forth. It is unusual
:in two respects. Unlike many creatively different versions
:of Forth, they decided it was sufficently different to have
:a new name. Also it was documented! It is no longer in use
:due to a lack of interest. But if anybody wants to find out
:more about it, digging thru the old archives will produce
:results.
And if you can't be bothered, I can mail you the version I have.
(However, be warned; I got it in upper case, including all the
documentation, and found it very hard to read, so it is now all lower
case in my copy.)
--
Communa -- you know soft spoken changes nothing
Mark K. Gardner
> [...]
>get it faster from the Forth Interest Group in California,
>http://www.fig.org/ (at least until their special printing runs
The URL should be <http://www.forth.org/> rather than the above.
Mark
--
Mark K. Gardner (mkga...@cs.uiuc.edu)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Real-Time Systems Laboratory
--
Chris Jakeman
>
> Michael Schuerig wrote:
>
> > So, can you recommend any of those "zero" books? I've never
> > used Forth and I'm not sure I ever will. I'm much more
> > attracted to languages from the Lisp family -- nonetheless,
> > my curiousity has slowly grown over the years.
> <SNIP>
> See the FAQ for comp.lang.forth for a list.
FIG UK operates a lending library with all the newer titles. You have to
become a member (£10/year) first though :) See the web site.
--
Bye for now
____/ / __ / / / / /
Chris Jakeman / / / _/ / / / /
__/ / / __ / / /_/
/ / / / / / / \
__/ __/ ____/ ___/ __/ _\
Forth Interest Group United Kingdom Chapter
Voice +44 (0)1733 753489 at www.users.zetnet.co.uk/aborigine/forth.htm
Andreas Kochenburger
(Christopher B. Browne) wrote:
>On 11 Jul 1999 10:11:19 GMT, Rob Warnock <rp...@rigden.engr.sgi.com> posted:
>>Andi Kleen <ak...@muc.de> wrote:
>>Really??? There are dozens & dozens of Schemes[*] that *I* know of...
>>How many Forths are there? Even a dozen?
><http://www.forth.org/compilers.html>, and that list is decidedly not
>comprehensive.
>Lisp Users:
>Due to the holiday next Monday, there will be no garbage collection.
>cbbr...@ntlug.org- <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
Is there a "Forth in LISP" or a "LISP in FORTH"? I know only of a
Forth native code compiler written in PROLOG (recursion is natural in
PROLOG so the backtracking lends itself to compiling primitives first
and succeeding hilevel words).
Andreas
Marcel Hendrix
[..]
>Is there a "Forth in LISP" or a "LISP in FORTH"?
LISP in Forth exists. Well, it doesn't try to emulate LISP but it adds
a LISP-like vocabulary to Forth, mainly list building words with garbage collection. The original
F-PC code for it is on Taygeta, it even has some documentation.
The GC stinks, I never got it to reliably work in a 32-bit flat model
Forth (iForth) after I converted it from its segment-based origin.
I've added some Prolog code to it published in JFAR (Feuerbacher?). The
demo is a rule-based AI program to determine animals :-)
-marcel
Mark Carroll
(snip)
>Amazon always says "4 to 6 weeks", even if they know that the shipment
>will arrive tomorrow. Does it take them that long to reprogram their
>computer?
Nonsense - that's been by far the minority of books I've ordered from
them - for instance, the first language book that I could think of,
"C: A Reference Manual", is claimed to ship in two to three days.
Certainly, number of in-print books and their expected delivery time
is not a bad way of getting a first estimate for the 'health' of a
language! Counting the number of currently-supported compilers you
could use to produce marketable software isn't a bad one either.
[ followups trimmed ]
-- Mark
Bernd Paysan
Ullrich Hoffmann wrote a Lisp in Forth, but IIRC, like many Forth
projects, he didn't really finish it. Alex Burger wrote and uses a
Lisp/Forth crossing (everything is list/symbol/number, but syntax is
Forth, or at least very Forth-like), called Lifo and Teatime (same, but
implemented in Java, with Java objects as first class data types).
IMHO Forth and Lisp are much closer to each other than to the rest of
the language space (Algol, Fortran, Cobol and derivatives).
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Bernd Paysan
Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> wrote:
> Btw, there are a LOT of users of Lisp who do not buy its products and
> prefer to use freeware; if you ask me, it is that practice which hurts
> the community most of all. People need to either contribute money (or
> public effort, if they insist on using publicware) but they should not
> expect to just "consume" without putting something back and have the
> community survive.
I hear this in the Forth community (which is also "dying" with
increasing traffic for 10 years now ;-), too, but IMHO, that's bull.
*If* freeware products are good enough (or better) than commercial
offerings, commercial offerings aren't worth the price. And since one of
the most popular C/C++ compiler also is freeware (GCC), I suppose C is
dying rapidly, too, eh? Ok, I must admit that the community there works:
they give back a lot of C code. But they also give back Lisp and Scheme
code, and encourage the use of these languages by embedding them as
macro languages in killer applications like Emacs or the Gimp (although
the latter is now getting a Perl interface to have a "more popular" and
"widely known" language it it - urgh. I'd take Scheme over Perl any
day).
IMHO the situation as it is - we see generations of inferiour languages
hyped and passing away, replaced by another inferiour language, while we
know what the "one real true thing" is - this situation has a cause. The
masses aren't intelligent. Not above average - that's why they are
called masses. They want authorities and follow rules (think of the
"Life of Brian" scene of the masses in front of his house). That's how
mass-market languages are created: they have rules (strong typing!
static checks!), and they have restrictions (no run-time generated code!
not extensible by the user - at least not in creative ways!!).
People don't want to think. They don't want to choose one of 23
user-level implementations of OOP, or even decide to write their own
one. They want to have a single standard OOP. Everybody will request
that his feature need of the day is included in the single standard. And
finally, they'll realize that they need to start over again, because
this particular language converted to an unmaintainible mess. But
they'll never come to the point to allow the user to add his feature of
the day. That would be chaos. And that would be just like the dying
languages, Lisp, etc. ...
Samuel A. Falvo II
>macro languages in killer applications like Emacs or the Gimp (although
>the latter is now getting a Perl interface to have a "more popular" and
>"widely known" language it it - urgh. I'd take Scheme over Perl any
>day).
Is "Getting" a perl interface? What's taking them so long? The Python
interface has already been out for quite some time. ;)
==========================================================================
KC5TJA/6 | -| TEAM DOLPHIN |-
DM13 | Samuel A. Falvo II
QRP-L #1447 | http://www.dolphin.openprojects.net
Oceanside, CA |......................................................
Csaba Raduly
>
> Elizabeth D Rather wrote:
>
> Since Forth is still being
> used, I can deduce that Lisp is still being used, even tho I
> don't know where.
In EMACS, of course (if you're talking about the language
with the parentheses :-).
Csaba
--
Csaba Raduly, Software Developer (OS/2), Sophos Anti-Virus
mailto:csaba....@sophos.com http://www.sophos.com/
US Support +1 888 SOPHOS 9 UK Support +44 1235 559933
Life is complex, with real and imaginary parts.
Samuel A. Falvo II
>In EMACS, of course (if you're talking about the language
>with the parentheses :-).
EMACS is making the transition to Scheme, I believe, because of a simpler
(read: easier to maintain) implementation. Also, the GIMP uses Scheme as
its native scripting language.
Craig Brozefsky
> On Thu, 15 Jul 1999 18:57:07 +0100, Csaba Raduly <csaba....@sophos.com> wrote:
> >In EMACS, of course (if you're talking about the language
> >with the parentheses :-).
>
> EMACS is making the transition to Scheme, I believe, because of a simpler
> (read: easier to maintain) implementation.
You have obviously never taken a look at eval.c in Guile. I'm not
sure you could argue that it simplifies anything.
It is a ways off before we see guile in emacs. Year minimum.
--
Craig Brozefsky <cr...@red-bean.com>
Free Scheme/Lisp Software http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
I say woe unto those who are wise in their own eyes, and yet
imprudent in 'dem outside -Sizzla
Jean-Francois Brouillet
wrote:
[snipped]
> I hear this in the Forth community (which is also "dying" with
> increasing traffic for 10 years now ;-), too, but IMHO, that's bull.
[snipped]
I'm a bit sad to see one of the most creative clf contributor
under the light of the most narrowly minded guy:
> People don't want to think. They don't want to choose one of 23
> user-level implementations of OOP, or even decide to write their own
> one. They want to have a single standard OOP. Everybody will request
> that his feature need of the day is included in the single standard. And
> finally, they'll realize that they need to start over again, because
> this particular language converted to an unmaintainible mess. But
> they'll never come to the point to allow the user to add his feature of
> the day. That would be chaos. And that would be just like the dying
> languages, Lisp, etc. ...
If what you are alluding to is that "people" (whoever they are, since
no qualification is given) don't want to think about how implementing
the division each time they want to compute some ratio, then I guess
they are right. If those same people don't want to think about how
to implement an array each time they want...err! an array! I still do
think they are right. Not even speaking about anything more clever
having passed the darwinian selection: records, lists, nodes...
Maybe "People" want to think with _abstractions_ something that Forth
can deliver, but that Forthers have consistently failed to deliver over
the past 25 years. It doesn't matter whether we have the choice of
23 OOP system, if none of them is either good or documented enough to
attract the interest of a wide audience, which, in turn, would promote
more attention.
This attitude, "The Users Are Just Stupid Idiots" is so well encroached
these days, that I'm wondering if you're not more a Linux geek (Damn
the user!) than a Forther (Damn the abstraction!).
Too bad to see talents blinded by selfish, elitist considerations.
Early answers are...early answers
Wrong answers are...wrong answers
Rob Warnock
+---------------
| Also, the GIMP uses Scheme as its native scripting language.
Yeah, but didn't they use "SIOD" as their Scheme?
*Old* syntax, no where near R[45]RS...
-Rob
p.s. Don't get me wrong, SIOD is nice & small, and *fast*-starting.
But picking it for the scripting base of a new tool and then saying
"uses Scheme" makes about as much sense as picking (say) Lisp 1.6 and
then saying "Hey, what are you CL guys complaining about, we used Lisp"...
Anton Ertl
Kochen...@gmx.de (Andreas Kochenburger) writes:
> I know only of a
> Forth native code compiler written in PROLOG
Please elaborate. Where can I get it?
- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
Anton Ertl
Michael Coughlin <m-cou...@ne.mediaone.net> writes:
> Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
> of
> shelves
> alive with about half to one third as many books as Fortran,
> while Fortran has about one tenth as many books as the big guys
> like C, Java, Visual Basic and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
Your result may be biased by your selection of bookstores. They'll
probably have to close MIT before LISP and Scheme books will vanish
from the Cambridge (MA) bookstores.
I was just at two bookstores near TU Wien. I did not see LISP,
Scheme, or Forth books. Interestingly, I did not even see a Prolog
book, although we have an obligatory Prolog course in our curriculum;
apparently the course notes are good enough. I saw books for some not
so popular languages: Ada, Haskell, Icon, Miranda, ML, Modula-2,
Oberon.
Concerning the metric you use to evaluate the health of a language: I
think we have now enough experience to conclude that it is wrong. You
whined about the lack of Forth books five years ago, but I see no
indication that Forth is any worse off than then, on the contrary,
other indicators are usually positive: clf traffic has grown, there
are fewer "Forth is dying" postings, implementations for new platforms
(e.g., PalmPilot, Lego Mindstorms) are demanded and supplied quickly,
participation at EuroForth is stable...
> When I meet people who tell me they want to learn all
> about computing, including programming, I want to say learn
> Forth. But I know that woun't work since they can't even go
> to the bookstore and buy a book about it.
And later you claim that Amazon.com is not a book store for this
purpose. Why? Sure, they cannot browse, but they have your
recommendation, and in the case of the Forth Programmer's Handbook
AFAIK they can even download an evaluation copy.
Moreover, there are several on-line Forth courses, so why would they
need to buy a book in a bookstore to learn Forth?
Using my metric of postings in comp.lang groups, here are the postings
present on news.tuwien.ac.at on July 11, 1997 and July 16, 1999. You
will notice that a lot of newsgroups have vanished, that's because
this newsserver has dropped groups that nobody here reads:
1997 1999
3 comp.lang.JavaScript
476 268 comp.lang.ada
206 comp.lang.apl
6 2 comp.lang.asm
786 581 comp.lang.asm.x86
78 comp.lang.asm370
117 144 comp.lang.awk
1 comp.lang.basic
447 comp.lang.basic.misc
114 646 comp.lang.basic.visual
282 comp.lang.basic.visual.3rdparty
691 760 comp.lang.basic.visual.database
3115 3429 comp.lang.basic.visual.misc
39 comp.lang.beta
2458 2471 comp.lang.c
2286 2518 comp.lang.c++
59 comp.lang.c++.leda
328 568 comp.lang.c++.moderated
51 63 comp.lang.c.moderated
968 comp.lang.clarion
731 655 comp.lang.clipper
224 625 comp.lang.clipper.visual-objects
32 comp.lang.clos
23 comp.lang.clu
485 comp.lang.cobol
5 comp.lang.cplu
5 comp.lang.crass
40 comp.lang.dylan
334 152 comp.lang.eiffel
6 comp.lang.for
233 470 comp.lang.forth
53 comp.lang.forth.mac
421 473 comp.lang.fortran
57 87 comp.lang.functional
31 comp.lang.hermes
31 28 comp.lang.icon
32 comp.lang.idl
122 183 comp.lang.idl-pvwave
309 252 comp.lang.java
815 1318 comp.lang.java.advocacy
12 comp.lang.java.announce
137 72 comp.lang.java.api
118 178 comp.lang.java.beans
210 comp.lang.java.corba
2 comp.lang.java.database
277 394 comp.lang.java.databases
4 comp.lang.java.developer
391 1045 comp.lang.java.gui
772 1625 comp.lang.java.help
15 comp.lang.java.javascript
84 171 comp.lang.java.machine
208 comp.lang.java.misc
3440 3864 comp.lang.java.programmer
194 212 comp.lang.java.security
40 comp.lang.java.setup
223 295 comp.lang.java.softwaretools
259 comp.lang.java.tech
1732 2869 comp.lang.javascript
16 comp.lang.limbo
197 791 comp.lang.lisp
24 comp.lang.lisp.franz
46 comp.lang.lisp.mcl
25 comp.lang.lisp.x
130 comp.lang.logo
136 110 comp.lang.misc
14 comp.lang.ml
88 comp.lang.modula2
69 comp.lang.modula3
171 comp.lang.mumps
72 comp.lang.oberon
66 101 comp.lang.objective-c
55 26 comp.lang.pascal
69 comp.lang.pascal.ansi-iso
664 297 comp.lang.pascal.borland
23 51 comp.lang.pascal.delphi
163 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.advocacy
21 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.announce
49 21 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.components
306 140 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.components.misc
222 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.components.usage
306 77 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.components.writing
1 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.database
888 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.databases
2061 864 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.misc
67 comp.lang.pascal.mac
221 111 comp.lang.pascal.misc
56 165 comp.lang.perl
7 1 comp.lang.perl.announce
1865 4223 comp.lang.perl.misc
260 comp.lang.perl.moderated
256 411 comp.lang.perl.modules
115 232 comp.lang.perl.tk
41 comp.lang.pl1
28 comp.lang.pop
284 252 comp.lang.postscript
77 comp.lang.prograph
83 97 comp.lang.prolog
404 999 comp.lang.python
141 155 comp.lang.rexx
3 comp.lang.rexx.tso
4 comp.lang.rexx.vm
26 51 comp.lang.sather
160 178 comp.lang.scheme
32 comp.lang.scheme.c
26 12 comp.lang.scheme.scsh
491 430 comp.lang.smalltalk
737 1235 comp.lang.tcl
23 7 comp.lang.tcl.announce
95 comp.lang.verilog
155 190 comp.lang.vhdl
2 comp.lang.visual
44 380 comp.lang.visual.basic
260 209 comp.lang.vrml
According to these numbers, both clf and cll traffic has grown a lot
in these two years, so I doubt that these languages are dying.
For more statistics, take a look at
http://metalab.unc.edu/usenet-i/hier-s/comp.lang.html. E.g., it
claims that clf has 24000 readers, and that cll has 31000 readers.
T. X. Puckett
an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:
& According to these numbers, both clf and cll traffic has grown a lot
& in these two years, so I doubt that these languages are dying.
The true question is, is the growth rate of comp.lang.forth greater
than or less than the growth rate of Usenet traffic in general? I
wouldn't say that more articles in, for example, talk.bizarre means
that the world is necessarily getting more bizarre. I'd say rather
that more bizarre people are posting more. What's the average
increase in posts in *lang* groups, and where does comp.lang.forth
stand on the curve?
--
U. Z. Puckett replace "sendnospam" with "puckett"
Barry
Forth. Inc (www.forth.inc) on Wednesday and it's been sitting on my desk
since this morning. (Friday). So it's available and it looks pretty good so
far.
Barry
Michael Coughlin <m-cou...@ne.mediaone.net> wrote in message
news:378CC969...@ne.mediaone.net...
> Elizabeth D Rather wrote:
>
> > Michael Coughlin wrote in message <378B405C...@ne.mediaone.net>...
> > >... Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
> > >of a computer language. Count the number of textbooks on
> > >the shelves of bookstores intead. I conclude that Lisp
> > >and Scheme are still alive with about half to one third
> > >as many books as Fortran, while Fortran has about one tenth
> > >as many books as the big guys like C, Java, Visual Basic
> > >and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
>
> > > When I meet people who tell me they want to learn all
> > >about computing, including programming, I want to say learn
> > >Forth. But I know that woun't work since they can't even go
> > >to the bookstore and buy a book about it. Well at least they
> > >can still get some nice books about Logo to get then
> > >started.
>
> > Is Amazon a bookstore? Several Forth books there.
>
> Amazon is not a bookstore. You can't drop in and
> browse. If you don't know what Forth is, or think that Forth
> isn't used anymore, you woun't notice a book about it by
> accident when you're looking for some other topic on
> programming. You can't just buy a book because you have it
> in your hot little hand and it looks interesting. You can't
> wrap it up and take it right home. People who don't even have an
> account to access amazon.com and the web are the easiest to
> influence to at least take a look at Forth. They have not
> learned the bad habits of other programming languages and can
> immediately appreciate the advantages of Forth.
>
> I just looked for Forth books on amazon.com. Yes there
> are several listings. There is only one listed as being in
> print, and they say expect delivery within 4 to 6 weeks. There
> are also listings for books by Leo Brodie. When I clicked on
> "Thinking Forth" I got nothing but a system error. There are
> five separate listings for Leo Brodie's book -- "Starting
> Forth". That's reasonable since it is at least five times better
> than the average book on programming. But its out of print. Its
> available only by a special search. It will take them weeks to
> find it or tell you if its not available. They don't tell you to
> get it faster from the Forth Interest Group in California,
> http://www.fig.org/ (at least until their special printing runs
> out). Relying on amazon.com to sell Forth textbooks is not a
> good thing. It would be better to have a publisher promoting the
> book and getting it into bookstores.
>
> Elizabeth Rather is much too shy and modest. She failed to
> mention her own book the "Forth Programmers' Handbook". So I'll
> tell everyone that it is the one Forth textbook that is in print
> and for sale at amazon.com. When I go to my local technical
> bookstores to see if it has finally arrived on the shelves (it
> hasn't), I find instead books on the equally neglected computer
> languages Lisp, Scheme and Logo. I think that Lisp and its
> relatives are much more lively than Forth since they still have
> recently revised textbooks for sale. Since Forth is still being
> used, I can deduce that Lisp is still being used, even tho I
> don't know where. But how long will Forth last without at least
> a few easily found textbooks?
> I wish old Forth programmers would become inspired by Lisp
> programmers to write textbooks so they would be able to train
> their replacements.
>
Bernd Paysan
> Is "Getting" a perl interface? What's taking them so long? The Python
> interface has already been out for quite some time. ;)
They seem to have problems getting the Gtk.pm package compiled and
installed properly (although I must say that the last version I tried
worked fine - so at least for me, the unstable version of Gtk has a Perl
interface).
Bernd Paysan
> This attitude, "The Users Are Just Stupid Idiots" is so well encroached
> these days, that I'm wondering if you're not more a Linux geek (Damn
> the user!) than a Forther (Damn the abstraction!).
>
> Too bad to see talents blinded by selfish, elitist considerations.
This is really getting political. I think the elitism of my generation
is a counter-reaction to the egalitarism of the '68 generation. It was a
nice idea, but it didn't work. Men are not equal - they are not even
created equal (different genes, different upbringing, different
teaching, etc.). There are brights and stupids. Talents are rare, and
worse, they all limit themselves to one or a few areas. You can't talk
to all people using the same language.
There is nothing wrong with the users being "stupid idiots" (compared to
the gurus). They may have other talents, and then, we know that they
need just a lot of hand-holding. There aren't just as many natural born
kernel hackers out. It just works better if your model of the world
reflects reality instead of an ideal state.
In fact, the Linuxer's attitude stems from assuming that the users
aren't just stupid idiots. That's why Linux is "difficult" to install
and has that load of "cryptic" commands, and all the man pages are so
hard to read.
I'm not doing MINOS because I need a self-explaining, dumped down GUI to
program. I'm doing it because I know that other people need that. You
can only reach the masses if you have some of Dogbert's cynicm.
Andreas Kochenburger
Ertl) wrote:
>In article <378d8c6d...@news.kwu.erl.siemens.de>,
> Kochen...@gmx.de (Andreas Kochenburger) writes:
>> I know only of a
>> Forth native code compiler written in PROLOG
>
>Please elaborate. Where can I get it?
It is a roughly 10 years old work/study in Turbo Prolog for DOS-PCs.
Design idea was of an old friend of mine, realization by me, but never
published. Turbo Prolog for DOS had some peculiarities, compared with
nowadays Edinburgh (?) C&M standard Prolog. The compiler generated
opcodes for Intel 8086 processors on the fly as a side-effect while
backtracking from lolevel to hilevel words. I.e. new primitives were
compiled, already compiled primitives were called, hilivel words were
sequences of calls - typical subroutine threading.
The idea was that the compiler maintained a database of Prolog clauses
in memory, hilevel Forth words were lists of atoms or strings or
literals. The kernel was just a file containing the Prolog database to
be loaded together with the parsed Forth application source. To start
the compiler one "asked" the Prolog program to find the "solution" for
the topmost Forth word, typically called MAIN. By unification with its
internal knowledge in that database the Prolog inference mechanism
took care of backtracking and finding all and only all needed words
for the MAIN word or program. The result: minimum code without any
redundancies - very very small and fast.
No assembler, but hardcoded primitives. No Forth _system_ but a code
compiler that could understand Forth. Tom Zimmer's TCOM was much more
powerful in that respect, but our generated code was smaller.
If you`re still interested I could send you a copy of the sources -
provided the old dusty disks are still readable.
Andreas
Michael Coughlin
> Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> wrote:
> > Btw, there are a LOT of users of Lisp who do not buy its
> > products and prefer to use freeware; if you ask me, it is
> > that practice which hurts the community most of all.
> > People need to either contribute money (or public effort,
> > if they insist on using publicware) but they should not
> > expect to just "consume" without putting something back
> > and have the community survive.
> I hear this in the Forth community (which is also "dying"
> with increasing traffic for 10 years now ;-), too, but IMHO,
> that's bull.
> *If* freeware products are good enough (or better) than
> commercial offerings, commercial offerings aren't worth the
> price. And since one of the most popular C/C++ compiler also
> is freeware (GCC), I suppose C is dying rapidly, too, eh?
> Ok, I must admit that the community there works: they give
> back a lot of C code.
The GNU C/C++ compiler is carefully designed to prove a
political opinion. Those who created it know that coprighting
software and keeping source code secret is an impediment to the
use of computers. They turned the practice of commercial
software companies on its head. After many years of work, these
people are finally getting their point across. Eventually we'll
see the only software worth using comes with unencumbered source
code.
Progress is being made. Computers change things. Now we
have computers a thousand times more powerful than they used to
be and sitting on anybody's desk that wants one. A program that
used to tax the resources of IBM to write is now a term project
for a student.
[snip]
> IMHO the situation as it is - we see generations of
> inferiour languages hyped and passing away, replaced by
> another inferiour language, while we know what the "one
> real true thing" is - this situation has a cause. The
> masses aren't intelligent. Not above average - that's why
> they are called masses. They want authorities and follow
> rules (think of the "Life of Brian" scene of the masses in
> front of his house). That's how mass-market languages are
> created: they have rules (strong typing! static checks!),
> and they have restrictions (no run-time generated code!
> not extensible by the user - at least not in creative
> ways!!).
> People don't want to think. They don't want to choose one
> of 23 user-level implementations of OOP, or even decide to
> write their own one. They want to have a single standard
> OOP. Everybody will request that his feature need of the
> day is included in the single standard. And finally, they'll
> realize that they need to start over again, because this
> particular language converted to an unmaintainible mess. But
> they'll never come to the point to allow the user to add his
> feature of the day. That would be chaos. And that would be
> just like the dying languages, Lisp, etc. ...
People who write programs do like to think and even solve
puzzles. Right now we keep changing things because we keep
thinking of new ways to compute. Extensible languages like Lisp
and Forth are particularly troublesome because they let you do
things differently easily. It would be nice to learn a few ways
of writing programs and just keep using them. But there is
always a new way to connect bits together waiting to be
discovered. And nobody has tried enough possibilities yet to
find the ones that have lasting value. There's one discovery
that I think is becoming clear. It is no longer desirable to
have programming languages and systems written by a business
corporation and covered by contracts, licenses, copyrights and
trade secrets. The best programs are going to be done with open
source by programmers communicating over the Internet. This is
simply doing things the way mathematicians do; after all
computing is part of mathematics. It no longer makes sense (if
it ever did in the first place) to write programs with the
business model of book publishing. On the other hand, it might
still make sense to write computer books with the business model
of book publishing. At least until the world wide web changes
the rules of publishing. And it will always make sense to hire
and pay experts who understand the computer programs a business
needs to use. How to know who these people are? Who wrote the
open source program that looks the best? Better yet, who wrote a
book or article telling you how to choose one of 23 user-level
implementations of OOP, and showed you how to write your own?
Raymond Toy
Michael> Progress is being made. Computers change things. Now we
Michael> have computers a thousand times more powerful than they used to
Michael> be and sitting on anybody's desk that wants one. A program that
Michael> used to tax the resources of IBM to write is now a term project
Michael> for a student.
I suppose this is true if you mean "computing resources of IBM". If
you mean programmers, then I don't see how this is possibly true
unless 99.9...9% of the term project has already been written for the
student. I don't think capabilities of programmers have quite scaled
in the same proportion as the speed of computers.
Ray
euph...@bigwig.net
On 1999-07-17 bernd....@gmx.de said:
:This is really getting political. I think the elitism of my
:generation is a counter-reaction to the egalitarism of the '68
:generation. It was a nice idea, but it didn't work. Men are not
:equal - they are not even created equal (different genes, different
:upbringing, different teaching, etc.). There are brights and
:stupids. Talents are rare, and worse, they all limit themselves to
:one or a few areas. You can't talk to all people using the same
:language.
I think perhaps you're out on your own on this one, Bernd. Whilst there
are a wide range of differences that prohibit any Marxian definition of
equality from holding - after all, that view was routed in the cotton
mills of the 1800s, where to a large extent people did droid jobs and
were interchangeable - and there are a range of intelligences in the
world, one thing that has persisted from the 60s is the concept of
people being of equal worth, provided they try hard. The last 20 years
have seen an expansion of the technology that allows people to utilise
their whole head-space, if you like; bounds such as work or upbringing
are no longer a bar to a fulfilling life.
And if I may be indelicate, fifty years ago the world had a *big*
disincentive to assigning different values to people put in front of it.
Christopher R. Barry
The speed and memory of computers has enabled professional teams or
programmers to design and implement languages like ANSI Common Lisp
that students can do their term projects in, instead of assembler
functions on OS/360 like IBM guys in the 60s had or whatever. If you
give one programmer with X capability a tool of Y power and a team of
20 programmers, each with the same X capability, a tool of Y/50 power,
the single programmer could come up with a better solution,
faster. The single programmer by using modern languages and tools is
leveraging the work of thousands of programmers and decades of design
and evolution and refinement. So it's not as though the solitary
programmer is really on their own.
Consider what writing a real-time display editor in the early 1970s
took. Nowadays with Java and Swing you can write one in 10 minutes
that supports rich text and embedded images in the document and can
save and restore files with this stuff in HTML format. (See the Java
tutorial at java.sun.com for an example of how easy this is to do.)
Christopher
Greg
> Consider what writing a real-time display editor in the early 1970s
> took. Nowadays with Java and Swing you can write one in 10 minutes
> that supports rich text and embedded images in the document and can
> save and restore files with this stuff in HTML format. (See the Java
> tutorial at java.sun.com for an example of how easy this is to do.)
And it has the dubious property of breaking when Java's marketing
people decide they want some other half-baked "feature" to compete
with VB. Or, when Sun decides to sell Java to somebody who really
breaks it.
Would I trust Lisp to be nominally stable? Yes- it has the potential
to be enhanced in a technically honest and nominally open manner.
That possibility doesn't exist with Java. Sun MIGHT make good
technical decisions on its enhancement this month- but they aren't
accountable and are only open to the point their PHBs want to be.
Thats not to say Java sucks- I can't say, BUT I can say I'd rather use
a language based (however erratically) on an open standard. To
paraphrase someone's quote, "..sucky open standards beat great closed
standards every time".
Gregm
Marco Antoniotti
Greg <nos...@erols.com> writes:
> cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry) writes:
...
> Would I trust Lisp to be nominally stable? Yes- it has the potential
> to be enhanced in a technically honest and nominally open manner.
> That possibility doesn't exist with Java. Sun MIGHT make good
> technical decisions on its enhancement this month- but they aren't
> accountable and are only open to the point their PHBs want to be.
>
> Thats not to say Java sucks- I can't say, BUT I can say I'd rather use
> a language based (however erratically) on an open standard. To
> paraphrase someone's quote, "..sucky open standards beat great closed
> standards every time".
So, what do you (plural) think? Is Java going to stay "relatively"
"open" or not?
What part of the Java library do you think are going to change without
"public consent"?
Just curious to see what reaction I stir. :)
Cheers
--
Marco Antoniotti ===========================================
PARADES, Via San Pantaleo 66, I-00186 Rome, ITALY
tel. +39 - 06 68 10 03 17, fax. +39 - 06 68 80 79 26
http://www.parades.rm.cnr.it/~marcoxa
Julian V. Noble
> Michael Coughlin wrote:
>
> > I think that Lisp and its
> > relatives are much more lively than Forth since they still have
> > recently revised textbooks for sale.
>
> of the finest computer science books I've ever read. Three that come to
> minds are
>
> _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming_ by Peter Norvig
>
> _The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs_ by Abelson and Sussman
>
> _On Lisp_ by Paul Graham (and his _ANSI Common Lisp_ is nice too)
>
> Leo Brodie's books got me very excited about Forth, even though I've still
> never been able to use to language for more than a few smallish projects.
> Just picking up _Thinking Forth_ from my bookshelf gets me seriously
> wondering why I'm not programming in the language more (but maybe that's
> another story).
>
> The last few Forth books in print have been useful and well-written, but
> not inspirational. The introduction to Julian Noble's "Programmers
> Hornbook" (which may not be the correct name) that he posted several years
> ago, made me very eager to read the rest of the book. Now _that's_ the
> kind of book I'd love to find on the shelf at a local shop.
>
> James
Thanks for that encomium. One heart attack and the advent of GUI Forths
have made it necessary to somewhat rewrite the book. If I could get
out from under a heavy teaching load and a lot of consulting work, I
would do this. My collaborator, Brad Rodriguez, would also have to re-
write the parts about interfacing to ports, etc.
Speaking of the local bookstore, I was horrified to discover today
that Computer Literacy in Washington, DC seems to be defunct. Anyone
have news from the West Coast?
--
Julian V. Noble
j...@virginia.edu
"Elegance is for tailors!" -- Ludwig Boltzmann
Erik Naggum
| The GNU C/C++ compiler is carefully designed to prove a political
| opinion. Those who created it know that coprighting software and keeping
| source code secret is an impediment to the use of computers. They turned
| the practice of commercial software companies on its head. After many
| years of work, these people are finally getting their point across.
| Eventually we'll see the only software worth using comes with
| unencumbered source code.
yeah, and written in languages and sub-languages so hard to understand
that it doesn't matter that the source is free, or written in special
dialects that can only be compiled by the compiler itself, or written
using so much magic that nobody dares touch it, however open it is.
remember, if people are going to get paid to offer commercial support
instead of for the product or the license to the product, they'll make
sure you need the support and that the authors are the only people who
can make any useful contributions.
| And nobody has tried enough possibilities yet to find the ones that have
| lasting value.
why are you so sure abou this? it is in the best interest of people who
desire users to make something _appear_ new, and if you need programmers
to get excited about your new free software project, what better way to
get them interested than to re-package some old stuff in maringally new
ways that can't be used with the rest of the old stuff? take a good look
at what the industry accepts as "invention" these days, and shudder.
free software will not change this, it will only redirect the efforts to
and the means of appearing new and attractive.
the problem with all these fancy predictions about how new technology and
a slight change in licensing terms will change the world is that they
ignore the mediocre people and anyone out to make a quick buck. and the
really the sad thing is that you don't allow mediocre people and quick
bucks, you won't get the system booted. most of the hype about what will
happen in the future of free software and free access to everything is
based on the pipe dream that in the future, the stupid people have ceased
to provide the bread and butter of a society, and only smart, idealistic
people remain. but we still need people to farm the land, dig wells,
keep all the electric wires and fibers operational, and take care of the
refuse of human society, and they will want computers, too. as long as
this mass market of non-programmers exists, there will be providers who
think in terms of units sold. even with his shadowy soul and psychotic
paranoid destructiveness, Bill Gates has at least got that part right.
#:Erik
--
@1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century
Greg
> * Michael Coughlin <m-cou...@ne.mediaone.net>
> | The GNU C/C++ compiler is carefully designed to prove a political
> | opinion. Those who created it know that coprighting software and keeping
> | source code secret is an impediment to the use of computers. They turned
> | the practice of commercial software companies on its head. After many
> | years of work, these people are finally getting their point across.
> | Eventually we'll see the only software worth using comes with
> | unencumbered source code.
>
> yeah, and written in languages and sub-languages so hard to understand
> that it doesn't matter that the source is free, or written in special
> dialects that can only be compiled by the compiler itself, or written
> using so much magic that nobody dares touch it, however open it is.
How is this different from closed source "proprietary" stuff? It's
of potential value to have all the warts exposed- at least you know
what you're getting (or at least its possible to know).
>
> remember, if people are going to get paid to offer commercial support
> instead of for the product or the license to the product, they'll make
> sure you need the support and that the authors are the only people who
> can make any useful contributions.
Only if they can control the source. I'm not saying what you propose
is impossible, only somewhat less likely relative to closed systems.
If the source is open, a wrecked architecture can more easily be
reborn because none of the clean-room reverse engineering foolishness
is required.
>
> | And nobody has tried enough possibilities yet to find the ones that have
> | lasting value.
>
> why are you so sure abou this? it is in the best interest of people who
> desire users to make something _appear_ new, and if you need programmers
> to get excited about your new free software project, what better way to
> get them interested than to re-package some old stuff in maringally new
> ways that can't be used with the rest of the old stuff? take a good look
> at what the industry accepts as "invention" these days, and shudder.
> free software will not change this, it will only redirect the efforts to
> and the means of appearing new and attractive.
But again, if the software architecture is open its more likely the
Emperor's new clothes will be detected or not. We should be careful
of talking too much about the lack of progress/creativity- I remember
in the 1980s some columnist or other said all the applications had
been written; we had word processors, spreadsheets and database apps-
what else was there?
>
> the problem with all these fancy predictions about how new technology and
> a slight change in licensing terms will change the world is that they
I don't think the particular licensing terms are worth a hill of beans
in themselves. I believe the significance of the open source stuff is
in the mass opening of apps to public scrutiny and input. It
certainly won't prevent the darker aspects of human nature from taking
advantage, but it allows people to choose their poison.
> ignore the mediocre people and anyone out to make a quick buck. and the
> really the sad thing is that you don't allow mediocre people and quick
> bucks, you won't get the system booted. most of the hype about what will
> happen in the future of free software and free access to everything is
I agree its hyped at this point, but "public" open source isn't but a
year or so old. Once the "Next Thing" comes around, I think things
will settle down a little- and this movement will assume its place in
the ever more complicated computer infrastructure we're surrounding
ourselves with.
> based on the pipe dream that in the future, the stupid people have ceased
> to provide the bread and butter of a society, and only smart, idealistic
> people remain. but we still need people to farm the land, dig wells,
> keep all the electric wires and fibers operational, and take care of the
> refuse of human society, and they will want computers, too. as long as
> this mass market of non-programmers exists, there will be providers who
> think in terms of units sold.
The presumption of open source being the End All has about as much
weight as Java being the End All- mere line noise. When Java was new,
it was the next generation, now its more like just another language with
its own tradeoffs.
> even with his shadowy soul and psychotic
> paranoid destructiveness, Bill Gates has at least got that part right.
I hope Bill tastes ashes seeing the industry slip from his unbridled
control- drawing away just out of reach ever further the harder he
tries to grab it again.
Gregm
Philip Preston
[snip]
> I remember
>in the 1980s some columnist or other said all the applications had
>been written; we had word processors, spreadsheets and database apps-
>what else was there?
I remember a program from the mid '80s called "The Last One". It appeared to
be a kind of applications generator and was advertised as "the only program
you will ever need". The hype must have worked because a year or so later
the same company published "The Last One - Version 2" :(
Philip.
Member of FIG-UK http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/aborigine/forth.htm
Bernd Paysan
> And if I may be indelicate, fifty years ago the world had a *big*
> disincentive to assigning different values to people put in front of it.
You are makeing the same fault these people and the writers of the
declaration of independence did, you equate unequality with unequal
values. This lead to many discriminations (e.g. women are obviously
unequal to men, and therefore it took quite a while to get them the same
rights. Same as black/indian people obviously were unequal to white
people, and therefore completely left out of the original DoI, by
declaring "all white men are born equal". Hm, me thinks they didn't have
a midwife in the team ;-).
I also beg to not depend on the "try hard enough". There are simply
people out there that can try as hard as they can, and still cannot
achieve something that seems normal to the ordinary people (handicap).
It should not reduce their value.
BTW: The idea of equal value of all humans is originated by Mencius, a
follower of Confuzius. Mencius assumes that humans are good by nature
and get bad by outer violence, and he derives the equal value of all men
by weighting their (potential) virtue. One cannot lessen the ethical
principles Confuzius and his followers have worked out, and that came to
our culture during the age of enlightenment. Equal value doesn't result
in boring equality, it just requires that you should use the same rules
for everybody.
Julian V. Noble
> Bernd Paysan <bernd....@gmx.de> writes:
>
> > You are makeing the same fault these people and the writers of the
> > declaration of independence did, you equate unequality with unequal
> > values. This lead to many discriminations (e.g. women are obviously
> e
> > rights. Same as black/indian people obviously were unequal to white
> > people, and therefore completely left out of the original DoI, by
> e
> > a midwife in the team ;-).
>
> have a look...
>
> I don't know which "original DoI" you are referring to, do you have a
> reference? The one printed in Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged
> Dictionary of the English Language reads as follows:
>
> "The Declaration of Independence
> In Congress, July 4, 1776
>
> [...]
>
> We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created
> equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable =
>
> Rights [...]"
>
> And while we are at it,
>
> "man [...] 4. a human being; a person (usually used in contexts in
> which sexual distinctions are not relevant) [...]"
>
> Yours,
> Clemens -- sorry for being offtopic.
> -- =
If you hadn't posted the correction, I would have. The Declaration
of Independence, one of the two foundation documents of the American
experiment, refers neither to race nor--given the vagaries of
the English language--to sex.
The original US Constitution, to its disgrace, considers "persons born
in a condition of servitude" (I think that is how it is phrased--I
don't have my copy nearby) equal to 3/5 of free persons for the purpose
of proportional representation in the House of Representatives. But it
also makes no reference to race.
There are many myths, originating with J.-J. Rousseau, about the mis-
treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans. Actually, the Indians
killed at least 10 for 1 in attacks on settlers. Most loss of Indian
population took place through disease, not warfare. That was certainly
unfortunate, to say the least, but it is easy to forget that smallpox,
diphtheria, chicken pox and whooping cough--not to mention cholera,
typhus and typhoid fever--killed lots of Europeans in America. Medicine
just wasn't very good at that time, and the mortality rates for Euros
(from those diseases) stood at close to 50%. The main reason the Euro-
peans dominated the Americas had to do with their agricultural lifestyle.
Agriculture permits much higher population densities than hunting.
Jerry Avins
>
> Julian V. Noble wrote:
>
> > There are many myths, originating with J.-J. Rousseau, about the mis-
> > treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans. Actually, the Indians
> > killed at least 10 for 1 in attacks on settlers.
>
> and the Indians have the *temerity* to object and even to *gasp*
> fight the people who invaded their country. Disgraceful!
>
> --
> Gareth McCaughan Gareth.M...@pobox.com
> sig under construction
In at least one case, the Indians contracted their smallpox from
infected blankets donated to them for the purpose. Not the first
instance of germ warfare, but an early one.
Jerry
--
Engineering is the art | Let's talk about what
of making what you want | you need; you may see
from things you can get. | how to do without it.
---------------------------------------------------------
John Passaniti
Gareth McCaughan <Gareth.M...@pobox.com> wrote in message
news:86d7xgf...@g.local...
> Yeah, shocking. These people come and take the
> Indians' land, and the Indians have the *temerity*
> to object and even to *gasp* fight the people who
> invaded their country. Disgraceful!
Well what do you expect from savages? Good thing god-fearing
Christians came in to show them the way! We all know that anything
drenched in Christianity automatically is blessed with love and
compassion.
(whoops-- off topic-- better recover...)
Damn those C savages. They're hardly dealing with any meaningful
abstraction at all. Good thing we [Lisp|Forth] fans can sweep in and
show them the way. We all know that anything with [Lisp|Forth] in it
is automatically better.
Gareth McCaughan
> There are many myths, originating with J.-J. Rousseau, about the mis-
> treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans. Actually, the Indians
> killed at least 10 for 1 in attacks on settlers.
Yeah, shocking. These people come and take the Indians' land,
and the Indians have the *temerity* to object and even to *gasp*
fight the people who invaded their country. Disgraceful!
--
Christopher B. Browne
<Gareth.M...@pobox.com> posted:
>Julian V. Noble wrote:
>> There are many myths, originating with J.-J. Rousseau, about the mis-
>> treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans. Actually, the Indians
>> killed at least 10 for 1 in attacks on settlers.
>
>Yeah, shocking. These people come and take the Indians' land,
>and the Indians have the *temerity* to object and even to *gasp*
>fight the people who invaded their country. Disgraceful!
The point is that Rousseau's position involves myths and propaganda, much
as later positions involve myths and propaganda, much as the positions
promoted today involve myths and propaganda.
In order to get to the root of the issues, you have to at least *try*
to strip off the propaganda.
--
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen
or 1024 chickens?"
-- Seymour Cray
cbbr...@ntlug.org- <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
Len Zettel
"Julian V. Noble" wrote:
>
(snip)
> The Declaration of Independence, one of the two foundation
> documents of the American experiment, refers neither to
> race nor--given the vagaries of the English language--to sex.
>
Off topic, but I am finally provoked to reply. You have to consider
"all men are created equal" in the context of a world where your
value could be determined by who your parents were. If they were
serfs, you were a serf. If they were nobles, you were nobles, and
this God-ordained outcome could not be changed by anybody. The revolutionary
feature of the declaration was to deny this.
>
> There are many myths, originating with J.-J. Rousseau, about the mis-
> treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans. Actually, the Indians
> killed at least 10 for 1 in attacks on settlers.
I would vigorously deny this. The Iroquois were subjected to systematic
genocide (more kindly, scorched earth warfare). during the revolutionary
war. Their word for US president translates as "village burner".
The Cherokee were moved to Oklahoma under the most incredibly inhumane
conditions that killed thousands in defiance of a supreme court order
in their favor. Etcetra et cetra ad nauseam.
> Most loss of Indian population took place through disease, not warfare.
True (as far as we know).
>That was certainly unfortunate, to say the least,
It was also in at least some cases deliberate. Lord Amherst is notorious
for advocating during what the US calls the "French and Indian" war
spreading of small pox as a battle tactic, and
there is good documentation that this was done every now and again
then and since.
(snip)
> The main reason the Europeans dominated the Americas had to do with
> their agricultural lifestyle.
> Agriculture permits much higher population densities than hunting.
Also crucial was the fact that it supported a military technology
(mass armies with firearms who could conduct a sustained campaign)
that the natives had no way of matching. They could exist only at
the sufferance of the white man, who in many cases really believed
"the only good Indian is a dead Indian".
War in North America on both sides was much more reminiscent of
the Balkans than anything that occurred in Western Europe at the
time.
-LenZ-
eup...@cwcom.net
On 1999-07-23 bernd....@gmx.de said:
:euph...@bigwig.net wrote:
:> And if I may be indelicate, fifty years ago the world had a *big*
:> disincentive to assigning different values to people put in front
:> of it.
:You are makeing the same fault these people and the writers of the
:declaration of independence did, you equate unequality with unequal
:values.
Unfortunately you snipped the bit where I drew that exact distinction,
between inequality and unequal worth. What I am saying is that this is
the way the world tends to work, and believe me, I have ample reason for
saying that this is the case. The real world, real human nature, is not
and never will be some kind of Objectivist utopia, until humanity is
able to grow up and see the distinction. *That* is what I am saying.
:Equal value doesn't result in boring equality, it
:just requires that you should use the same rules for everybody.
Precisely, but just as you propose that most humans are rather thick, I
will state that most humans are not capable of dealing with difference
to such a degree as awarding it equal value; they will assign weight to
those most like themselves.
I got quite the opposite sense from your post, and from what you have
said on the issue before, interestingly; I thought you came across as
explicitly devaluing those who didn't have the neat "intelligence" skill
that some of us found almost as burdensome as convenient in our
schooldays. (Can you imagine growing up in an environment where being too
bright earns you contempt?)
--
the desk lisard communa time's taught the killing game herself
Net-Tamer V 1.11.2 - Test Drive
Jerry Avins
>
...
>
> I got quite the opposite sense from your post, and from what you have
> said on the issue before, interestingly; I thought you came across as
> explicitly devaluing those who didn't have the neat "intelligence" skill
> that some of us found almost as burdensome as convenient in our
> schooldays. (Can you imagine growing up in an environment where being too
> bright earns you contempt?)
> --
> the desk lisard communa time's taught the killing game herself
>
> Net-Tamer V 1.11.2 - Test Drive
Sure; I immagine that many of us did. "Nerd" was originally "knurd"
(drunk spelled backward), i.e. one of those who study instead of
partying. If you can't match them, despise them.
Paul Wallich
>On 26 Jul 1999 01:10:40 +0100, Gareth McCaughan
><Gareth.M...@pobox.com> posted:
>>Julian V. Noble wrote:
>>> There are many myths, originating with J.-J. Rousseau, about the mis-
>>> treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans. Actually, the Indians
>>> killed at least 10 for 1 in attacks on settlers.
>>
>>Yeah, shocking. These people come and take the Indians' land,
>>and the Indians have the *temerity* to object and even to *gasp*
>>fight the people who invaded their country. Disgraceful!
>
>The point is that Rousseau's position involves myths and propaganda, much
>as later positions involve myths and propaganda, much as the positions
>promoted today involve myths and propaganda.
FWIW, the "most deaths were caused by disease" bit is similarly
propagandistic, since (some) settlers were known for selling to
the natives blankets that had previously been the property of
smallpox victims, with the knowledge and intent that those blankets
would spread contagion in a population that was immunologically
vulnerable.
paul
eup...@cwcom.net
On 1999-07-25 j...@node2.unix.Virginia.EDU(JulianV.Noble) said:
:There are many myths, originating with J.-J. Rousseau, about the
:mis- treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans. Actually, the
:Indians killed at least 10 for 1 in attacks on settlers.
No. The Indians had a bloody good go at stopping themselves from being
invaded; sheer force of numbers and an unprepared immune system may not
have helped, but the fact is that white men stole their land.
How hard would *you* fight an invading force?
William Tanksley
>On 1999-07-25 j...@node2.unix.Virginia.EDU(JulianV.Noble) said:
> :There are many myths, originating with J.-J. Rousseau, about the
> :mis- treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans. Actually, the
> :Indians killed at least 10 for 1 in attacks on settlers.
>No. The Indians had a bloody good go at stopping themselves from being
>invaded; sheer force of numbers and an unprepared immune system may not
>have helped, but the fact is that white men stole their land.
The fact is that by and large white men settled in their land. Some
tribes couldn't stand the newness, and lashed out. The Europeans couldn't
tell the difference between those tribes and the others, and they fought
them all.
Often unjustly and unfairly. Some worse than others -- this doesn't even
start to describe the Spanish conquest of the New World.
>How hard would *you* fight an invading force?
Right now, I use a thing called 'customs' or 'immigration laws'. It's
crude, but it works better than attacking immagrants right out.
>the desk lisard communa time's taught the killing game herself
This line (your signature), BTW, ends with a ^M. It's the only line in
your message to do so. The standards allow any sort of linebreaks, but
they assume that all the linebreaks are the same in one message.
--
-William "Billy" Tanksley
Samuel A. Falvo II
>>the desk lisard communa time's taught the killing game herself
>
>This line (your signature), BTW, ends with a ^M. It's the only line in
>your message to do so. The standards allow any sort of linebreaks, but
>they assume that all the linebreaks are the same in one message.
No, his entire *MESSAGE* ends with ^M characters, which throws SLRN for a
complete loop. I am wholly incapable of responding to his messages because
of it.
I discovered this when I got curious one day, and decided to use VI for my
editor instead of JED (VI is much more ... "open", shall we say, about
control codes than JED is). I was utterly appaulled(sp?) at what I had just
seen.
It seems that his news service tacks on an additional carriage return in his
messages: ^M^M^J, instead of ^M^J.
Also, the Usenet standards are quite specific about line terminations: ^M^J
-only-, which is the same as SMTP, SNMP, and others.
==========================================================================
KC5TJA/6 | -| TEAM DOLPHIN |-
DM13 | Samuel A. Falvo II
QRP-L #1447 | http://www.dolphin.openprojects.net
Oceanside, CA |......................................................
William Tanksley
>On Tue, 27 Jul 1999 20:05:29 GMT, William Tanksley <wtan...@dolphin.openprojects.net> wrote:
>>>the desk lisard communa time's taught the killing game herself
>>This line (your signature), BTW, ends with a ^M. It's the only line in
>>your message to do so. The standards allow any sort of linebreaks, but
>>they assume that all the linebreaks are the same in one message.
>No, his entire *MESSAGE* ends with ^M characters, which throws SLRN for a
>complete loop. I am wholly incapable of responding to his messages because
>of it.
I used to be. sudo cp ~wtanksle/.jedrc . to see my solution -- I order
Jed to convert everything to Unix mode.
>It seems that his news service tacks on an additional carriage return in his
>messages: ^M^M^J, instead of ^M^J.
I'm not sure about that -- I think there might be other problems. I think
that his last line is the only one with a bizzare ending, and one of your
tools got confused by it and tried to fix things the wrong way.
>Also, the Usenet standards are quite specific about line terminations: ^M^J
>-only-, which is the same as SMTP, SNMP, and others.
That's only true inside of MIME encoding; anywhere else ^M, ^J, ^M^J, and
^J^M are all explicitly permissable. Although because of the MIME
restriction ^M^J is recommended.
Consistency of line endings is not addressed, but the text is pretty clear
that 1) the sender should not send oddball stuff and 2) the reciever
should be able to handle oddball stuff if it's sent.
So we're both at fault here ;).
> KC5TJA/6 | -| TEAM DOLPHIN |-
--
-William "Billy" Tanksley
Bernd Paysan
> I got quite the opposite sense from your post, and from what you have
> said on the issue before, interestingly; I thought you came across as
> explicitly devaluing those who didn't have the neat "intelligence" skill
> that some of us found almost as burdensome as convenient in our
> schooldays. (Can you imagine growing up in an environment where being too
> bright earns you contempt?)
Last first: I learned that there's one thing they hate more than a
bright buddy; that's a bright and diligent buddy. So I compensated by
being lazy. I must also note that the German school system has a kind of
elitary touch by dividing into three different levels. Thus you separate
the more stupid ones after the fourth grade (the original idea was to
separate the masses, but with today's education requirements, it works
out only partly).
If you think that describing most people as looking for authority and
(mindlessly) following trends as devaluating, it's because you value
intelligence and independance. I don't think your buddies valued
anything of that.
I mean, we design our tools ourself. It's designed for us. We see that
other people simply don't like our tools, and they use tools that are
obviously inferiour (and which are subject to fashions). With "obviously
inferiour" I mean that I can master them better than any one of those
who refuse to have a look at Forth (or Lisp, it's the same). They just
don't come close to my favourite tool.
Saying "code monkey" to a VB programmer is easy, but it works out to be
bidirectional. I once interviewed (more for fun, it was a neighbor) as
admin of a VB shop that writes database applications (mostly front-ends)
and has a relatively demanding back office (Oracle, Suns, Linux boxes;
that's they were seeking skills). My interview partner concluded the
interview with the words that I wouldn't fit in the team because of too
many skills (I can't translate the German word he used, "Überflieger",
which means someone who flies over the others, and has a somewhat
negavite touch).
William Tanksley
>eup...@cwcom.net wrote:
>Last first: I learned that there's one thing they hate more than a
>bright buddy; that's a bright and diligent buddy. So I compensated by
>being lazy. I must also note that the German school system has a kind of
I'm just lazy. I can't blame the system; I was homeschooled.
>Saying "code monkey" to a VB programmer is easy, but it works out to be
>bidirectional.
Good point.
>that's they were seeking skills). My interview partner concluded the
>interview with the words that I wouldn't fit in the team because of too
>many skills (I can't translate the German word he used, "Überflieger",
>which means someone who flies over the others, and has a somewhat
>negavite touch).
A possibly more insulting term in English might be primadonna.
Overflier, huh? Cool. (I assume that that character you used would
transliterate as 'u' to make the word look like 'uberflieger'. I can't
see accent marks or other 'special chars' on this setup.)
>Bernd Paysan
--
-William "Billy" Tanksley
Jerry Avins
>
...
>
> Saying "code monkey" to a VB programmer is easy, but it works out to be
> admin of a VB shop that writes database applications (mostly front-ends)
> and has a relatively demanding back office (Oracle, Suns, Linux boxes;
> interview with the words that I wouldn't fit in the team because of too
> many skills (I can't translate the German word he used, "Überflieger",
> which means someone who flies over the others, and has a somewhat
> negavite touch).
>
> Bernd Paysan
> "If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
> http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
I still feel outrage at all the jobs I was turned down for because I was
"overqualified". Then I landed at Andrea Radio (where I helped build the
Mercury audio box) and after that RCA Labs. It the labs, some might say
I was barely qualified, but I hung on for 25 years, so maybe not.
Samuel A. Falvo II
>Overflier, huh? Cool. (I assume that that character you used would
>transliterate as 'u' to make the word look like 'uberflieger'. I can't
>see accent marks or other 'special chars' on this setup.)
It's your choice of fonts. I can see those characters with no problem.
PHBTPHT!! ;)
Seriously, though -- try changing your font to something that does NOT use
the PC extended graphics character set. That may help in seeing the
extended Latin character set.
==========================================================================
KC5TJA/6 | -| TEAM DOLPHIN |-
Samuel A. Falvo II
>I used to be. sudo cp ~wtanksle/.jedrc . to see my solution -- I order
>Jed to convert everything to Unix mode.
I'll do this later tonight. Thanks for the tip. I always knew it was a
problem with either JED or SLRN, which is why I never really complained
about it.
>I'm not sure about that -- I think there might be other problems. I think
>that his last line is the only one with a bizzare ending, and one of your
>tools got confused by it and tried to fix things the wrong way.
No, SLRN was having a major headachwe with it. JED had no problems with the
message. What SLRN was having a cow over was this:
Newsgroups: ...
Subject: ...
References: ...
Followup-To:
-->
...body...
Where the arrow points (-->) is where SLRN said it was a malformed message
because of the ^M character, but no ^J. JED had zero (that's right: zero)
problems editing the file.
Trust me on this one: this is entirely slrn's fault.
>That's only true inside of MIME encoding; anywhere else ^M, ^J, ^M^J, and
>^J^M are all explicitly permissable. Although because of the MIME
>restriction ^M^J is recommended.
Not according to the RFCs I have installed on my box. Where did you see
this? In all instances, for HTTP, SMTP, NNTP, etc, the sequence has always
been (and you'll notice that the servers only respond to) ^M followed by ^J,
in that specific order.
>So we're both at fault here ;).
No, the author of SLRN and the author of whatever news system Euphrates(sp?)
is using are at fault. ;) Slight difference.
Friedrich Dominicus
> > said on the issue before, interestingly; I thought you came across as
> > explicitly devaluing those who didn't have the neat "intelligence" skill
> > that some of us found almost as burdensome as convenient in our
> > schooldays. (Can you imagine growing up in an environment where being too
> > bright earns you contempt?)
>
> bright buddy; that's a bright and diligent buddy. So I compensated by
> being lazy. I must also note that the German school system has a kind of
You don't know the German school system do you? Yes we have different
levels, but some of our governments thought it would be a good idea to
put all on the same school. Unfortunatly it turned out for them that
this lowers the level. And even the politicians who were responsible for
that won't send their childrend to such a school. So the levels seem to
be quit e a fine idea. Men are different.
> Saying "code monkey" to a VB programmer is easy, but it works out to be
> bidirectional. I once interviewed (more for fun, it was a neighbor) as
> admin of a VB shop that writes database applications (mostly front-ends)
> and has a relatively demanding back office (Oracle, Suns, Linux boxes;
> that's they were seeking skills). My interview partner concluded the
> interview with the words that I wouldn't fit in the team because of too
> many skills (I can't translate the German word he used, "Überflieger",
> which means someone who flies over the others, and has a somewhat
> negavite touch).
This does not have necessarily have a negative touch. It's on one side
admiration and on the other side envy not to be one. But we're way
off-topic so now futher discussion if this.
Regards
Friedrich
Martin Rodgers
wtan...@dolphin.openprojects.net says...
> A possibly more insulting term in English might be primadonna.
Another term that I often hear is "tall poppy syndrome", which means
that some English people don't like anyone who stands out. It starts
at school and continues with advise like, "Keep your head down", "know
your station", and terms rather much more insulting than "primadonna".
> Overflier
I like that. ;)
--
Remove insect from address | You can never browse enough
will write code that writes code that writes code for food
Reuben Thomas
>
>No, SLRN was having a major headachwe with it. JED had no problems with the
>message. What SLRN was having a cow over was this:
I use slrn and jed and have no problems. I don't have a funny setup, I
think. ?
--
http://sc3d.org/rrt/ | certain, a. insufficiently analysed
Samuel A. Falvo II
>I use slrn and jed and have no problems. I don't have a funny setup, I
>think. ?
I am using slrn and jed, pretty much out of the box. I never touched their
configuration.
Stan Barr
>On Tue, 27 Jul 1999 20:05:29 GMT,
William Tanksley <wtan...@dolphin.openprojects.net> wrote:
>>
>>This line (your signature), BTW, ends with a ^M. It's the only line in
>>your message to do so. The standards allow any sort of linebreaks, but
>>they assume that all the linebreaks are the same in one message.
>
>No, his entire *MESSAGE* ends with ^M characters, which throws SLRN for a
>complete loop. I am wholly incapable of responding to his messages because
>of it.
>
It's OK here..... SLRN 0.9.4.3, Linux, Pentiom 166
The only ^M is in the sig.
--
Cheers,
Stan Barr st...@dial.pipex.com
The future was never like this!
eup...@cwcom.net
On 1999-07-27 bernd....@gmx.de said:
:> I got quite the opposite sense from your post, and from what you
:>have said on the issue before, interestingly; I thought you came
:>across as explicitly devaluing those who didn't have the neat
:>"intelligence" skill that some of us found almost as burdensome
:>as convenient in our schooldays. (Can you imagine growing up in
:>an environment where being too bright earns you contempt?)
:Last first: I learned that there's one thing they hate more than a
:bright buddy; that's a bright and diligent buddy. So I compensated
:by being lazy.
What I learned was that a bright, independent-minded and different
person has to suffer all kinds of shit. Not much I can do about this. :>
I was lazy, too, at least after I'd turned 14 - but nobody noticed...
(Also, I'd begun to exhibit signs of depression by then, and that was
partially, although ineffectively, picked up on.)
:I must also note that the German school system has a
:kind of elitary touch by dividing into three different levels. Thus
:you separate the more stupid ones after the fourth grade (the
:original idea was to separate the masses, but with today's
:education requirements, it works out only partly).
It's interesting that you mention this; the German school system is
occasionally held up here in the UK as a model of how to stream kids
without discriminating against the academic ones. Feel free to tell me
more via email. (Be nice to find out if it works...)
:If you think that describing most people as looking for authority
:and (mindlessly) following trends as devaluating, it's because you
:value intelligence and independance. I don't think your buddies
:valued anything of that.
They weren't "buddies". I grew up in Norfolk, which is frankly the UK's
equivalent of America's Deep South (you know, where they dig trenches in
the side of the road so the natives don't scuff their knuckles, and a
virgin is defined as a 9 year old who can outrun her brother?). I was
out of there soooooo fast... And yes, I suppose I do value intelligence
and independence, but they aren't the only things to be valued - and I
can't believe that you think they are.
:I mean, we design our tools ourself. It's designed for us. We see
:that other people simply don't like our tools, and they use tools
:that are obviously inferiour (and which are subject to fashions).
:With "obviously inferiour" I mean that I can master them better
:than any one of those who refuse to have a look at Forth (or Lisp,
:it's the same). They just don't come close to my favourite tool.
"Forth (or Lisp, it's the same)" almost exactly sums up my attitude to
Forth. :> You're right.
:Saying "code monkey" to a VB programmer is easy, but it works out
:to be bidirectional.
Woah! My commercial life is forcing me to use VB (well, Access) at work.
I can do many other things in many other languages, but I'm the only guy
who finds this application at all penetrable, and half our client base
depends on this... (Take it from me, some kinds of job security you just
don't need.)
:I once interviewed (more for fun, it was a
:neighbor) as admin of a VB shop that writes database applications
:(mostly front-ends) and has a relatively demanding back office
:(Oracle, Suns, Linux boxes; that's they were seeking skills). My
:interview partner concluded the interview with the words that I
:wouldn't fit in the team because of too many skills (I can't
:translate the German word he used, "Uberflieger", which means
:someone who flies over the others, and has a somewhat negavite
:touch).
"Overqualified"?
--
Larry Elmore
news:7nfqma$fkj$1...@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU...
>
> If you hadn't posted the correction, I would have. The Declaration
> of Independence, one of the two foundation documents of the American
> experiment, refers neither to race nor--given the vagaries of
> the English language--to sex.
Jefferson wrote better than he knew...
> The original US Constitution, to its disgrace, considers "persons born
> in a condition of servitude" (I think that is how it is phrased--I
> don't have my copy nearby) equal to 3/5 of free persons for the purpose
> of proportional representation in the House of Representatives. But it
> also makes no reference to race.
By the time Washington left the presidency, he was surprisingly anti-slavery
and considered the abolishment of the "Peculiar Institution" to be the one
great unfinished work of the Revolution, and likely to be increasingly
divisive, up to and including civil war.
> There are many myths, originating with J.-J. Rousseau, about the mis-
> treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans.
It's not the treatment of the Indians at the hands of European invaders
that's a myth, it was the idea of the "Noble Savage" that was mythical.
Colonial treatment of Indians ranged from amicable trade and peace to the
most barbaric savagery imaginable.
> Actually, the Indians
> killed at least 10 for 1 in attacks on settlers.
And settlers killed ~100 for 1 in attacks on Indians....
> Most loss of Indian
> population took place through disease, not warfare.
Very true.
>That was certainly
> unfortunate, to say the least, but it is easy to forget that smallpox,
> diphtheria, chicken pox and whooping cough--not to mention cholera,
> typhus and typhoid fever--killed lots of Europeans in America. Medicine
> just wasn't very good at that time, and the mortality rates for Euros
> (from those diseases) stood at close to 50%.
But the death toll was significantly higher for the Indians, as nearly all
early colonial accounts relate (often in glee at how "God's hand" removed
their enemies and left the land for them). Of course, sexually transmitted
diseases (causing sterility) and alcohol also played significant roles.
> The main reason the Euro-
> peans dominated the Americas had to do with their agricultural lifestyle.
> Agriculture permits much higher population densities than hunting.
The Indians of the East Coast, and the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys
were _primarily_ farmers, too. What they practiced would be more properly
called horticulture rather than agriculture, but they lived in settled towns
with extensive fields and orchards. It's very likely that the Indian
population had _already_ declined by ~90% by 1600 AD.
Military technology played an important role, too.
Larry
Larry Elmore
news:slrn7ps488....@dolphin.openprojects.net...
> On Tue, 27 Jul 1999 18:21:19 GMT, eup...@cwcom.net wrote:
>
> >On 1999-07-25 j...@node2.unix.Virginia.EDU(JulianV.Noble) said:
> > :mis- treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans. Actually, the
> > :Indians killed at least 10 for 1 in attacks on settlers.
>
> >invaded; sheer force of numbers and an unprepared immune system may not
> >have helped, but the fact is that white men stole their land.
>
> The fact is that by and large white men settled in their land. Some
> tribes couldn't stand the newness, and lashed out.
"Couldn't stand the newness?" They were being invaded and chased off their
own lands!
> The Europeans couldn't
> tell the difference between those tribes and the others, and they fought
> them all.
Not hardly. The Europeans were masters at playing tribes off one against
another, first allying with one, then another, until they had defeated all
of them. Very often, the tribes that collaborated the most were in the end
treated the worst (like the Cherokee).
> Often unjustly and unfairly. Some worse than others -- this doesn't even
> start to describe the Spanish conquest of the New World.
That was bad, alright, but read about some of the events of 1636 and 1676 --
the English could be and were every bit as bloodthirsty and merciless as the
Spaniards. In one respect, one could even argue that the Spanish treated
Indians better than the English because after the first few incredibly
bloody years and decades, the Spanish became alarmed at the precipitous
decline in the Indian population and the government tried to take measures
to reverse the trend. After all, if the Indians all died, who would do all
the work? In New England, though there was some slavery up through the
Revolution, the Protestant work ethic had a different effect. The settlers
would do their own work and most felt that the quicker all the Indians died
off, the better.
> >How hard would *you* fight an invading force?
>
> Right now, I use a thing called 'customs' or 'immigration laws'. It's
> crude, but it works better than attacking immagrants right out.
Immigrants are coming to _join_ this country, not invade it and take our
property by force despite historical fears of the "Yellow Peril," for
example. Mexico is not aggressively seeking Lebensraum at our expense, nor
does their government have a doctrine of Manifest Destiny (of Hispanic
control of North America).
Larry
Bernd Paysan
Well, I went to school in Germany. Actually in Bavaria, which makes
quite a difference to the northern part of Germany (as our politicians
don't like "socialist" ideas ;-).
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
eup...@cwcom.net
On 1999-07-28 r...@sc3d.org said:
:<kc5...@dolphin.openprojects.net> wrote: >
:>No, SLRN was having a major headachwe with it. JED had no
:>problems with the message. What SLRN was having a cow over was
:>this:
:I use slrn and jed and have no problems. I don't have a funny setup,
:I think. ?
I don't believe this. An entire subthread devoted to the deficiencies of
my newsreader...? Never mind; next week, I shall have a new computer and
Linux, and hopefully such problems will be history.
eup...@cwcom.net
On 1999-07-27 wtan...@dolphin.openprojects.net said:
:>How hard would *you* fight an invading force?
:Right now, I use a thing called 'customs' or 'immigration laws'.
:It's crude, but it works better than attacking immagrants right out.
Hmm. This is when I realised I'd touched a raw nerve. Sorry if telling
you that your country has immoral beginnings causes you a problem; it's
not something I imagine people taking personally.
There *is*, however, a qualitative difference between migration and
invasion. Just ask the Polish, or the Czechs, or... most of Europe. (Or
most of Britain's former colonies, for that matter. Certainly the
Canadians seem to think so.)
:>the desk lisard communa time's taught the killing game herself
:This line (your signature), BTW, ends with a ^M. It's the only
:line in your message to do so. The standards allow any sort of
:linebreaks, but they assume that all the linebreaks are the same in
:one message.
Again, I'm sorry if my decision to use DOS-based software to access
USEnet causes you a problem, but there's not a vast amount I can do
about it.
eup...@cwcom.net
On 1999-07-28 Friedrich...@inka.de said:
:> Last first: I learned that there's one thing they hate more than a
:> bright buddy; that's a bright and diligent buddy. So I
:> compensated by being lazy. I must also note that the German
:> school system has a kind of elitary touch by dividing into three
:> different levels.
:You don't know the German school system do you? Yes we have
:different levels, but some of our governments thought it would be a
:good idea to put all on the same school. Unfortunatly it turned out
:for them that this lowers the level. And even the politicians who
:were responsible for that won't send their childrend to such a
:school. So the levels seem to be quit e a fine idea. Men are
:different.
I am reminded for a second of that nice Mr Blair who is currently
running the country (with an iron grip). The rest of Europe should be
looking at Mr Blair and worrying, frankly. The grinning village idiot
who only wants to keep his friends happy and imagines everyone to be his
friend - that's the future of politics. It's only *starting* here.
:This does not have necessarily have a negative touch. It's on one
:side admiration and on the other side envy not to be one. But we're
:way off-topic so now futher discussion if this.
It would appear to be reasonably negative if you don't get the job. :>
Benjamin Kowarsch
>...the mistreatment of Native Americans by the Europeans...
>
I can't quite reconstruct how the Topic "Is LISP dying?" could have
possibly eveolved into the fate of Native Americans,
however, it is quite interesting how things are being named ...
The settlers who involved in disgraceful acts against humanity were
referred to as "Europeans".
Perhaps, if the subject was history to be proud of, these settlers would
have been referred to as "Americans".
This makes me wonder, when did the European settlers actually turn into
Americans ?
Just wondering..., no offense intended.
Here in Japan, where I live, we are equally treated as far as naming is
concerned. They call us "Oh-Bei-Jin" = European-American-Person(s).
Anyway, I had hoped to learn something about whether or not LISP has
future. Is there anyone who could post a summary with that focus ?
thanks
Benjamin
--
As an anti-spam measure I have scrambled my email address here.
Remove "nospam-" and ROT13 to obtain my email address in clear text.
Samuel A. Falvo II
>Anyway, I had hoped to learn something about whether or not LISP has
>future. Is there anyone who could post a summary with that focus ?
I fail to see how LISP is dying. With the likes of EMACS and GIMP, at the
very least, it will find application as a scripting language at a minimum.
And then you have the LISP die-hards who, like their Forth cousins, will
write and actively use/support their own compilers/interpreters.
Larry Elmore
news:nospam-orawnzva-...@ppp030-max03.twics.com...
> >
> >...the mistreatment of Native Americans by the Europeans...
> >
>
> I can't quite reconstruct how the Topic "Is LISP dying?" could have
> possibly eveolved into the fate of Native Americans,
>
> however, it is quite interesting how things are being named ...
>
> The settlers who involved in disgraceful acts against humanity were
> referred to as "Europeans".
>
> Perhaps, if the subject was history to be proud of, these settlers would
> have been referred to as "Americans".
>
> This makes me wonder, when did the European settlers actually turn into
> Americans ?
The term was first used to refer to the colonists in the years just prior to
the American Revolution. Before then (when it was used, which was apparently
not common) it referred to the Native Americans.
> Just wondering..., no offense intended.
>
> Here in Japan, where I live, we are equally treated as far as naming is
> concerned. They call us "Oh-Bei-Jin" = European-American-Person(s).
My understanding is that an accurate translation of that term is a bit less
flattering than that...
> Anyway, I had hoped to learn something about whether or not LISP has
> future. Is there anyone who could post a summary with that focus ?
I can't do that, but I suspect that it will be around for quite a long time
to come in one form or another. Emacs Lisp or Guile for Gimp (and Gnome,
IIRC), which is a dialect of Scheme which is a descendant of Lisp, come to
mind.
Larry
Benjamin Kowarsch
> The term was first used to refer to the colonists in the years just prior to
> the American Revolution. Before then (when it was used, which was apparently
> not common) it referred to the Native Americans.
I was more aiming at the fact, that they were called "Europeans" when they
did bad things, but probably "Americans" when they had done good things.
> > They call us "Oh-Bei-Jin" = European-American-Person(s).
>
> My understanding is that an accurate translation of that term is a bit less
> flattering than that...
Your understanding is wrong then. The translation is literal:
"Oh" for Europe, "Bei" for America and "Jin" for Person(s).
The only flattening thing for you, perhaps is, that Europe comes first. ;-)
BEI actually means Rice (in form of harvested crop) but has in this form
turned into the meaning of America. This is because of the way you write
America in chinese characters AH-MEI-LI-KA. The only distinctive character
in there is MEI, BEI is a different pronounciation of that character (like
multiple bindings for a variable in a programming language). The form
nowadays used is short BEI-KOKU (Rice Country) for America. In China they
use the character "Beautiful", pronounced MEI instead of "Rice", which
also stems from AH-MEI-LI-KA, but this time the short form MEI-GUO means
"Country of Beauty".
When matching a foreign term to chinese characters the aim is always to
find characters that do not only resemble the pronounciation but also have
positive meanings. In Japan rice is a sacred commodity, the term rice
country for America is an honour, not flattening at all. Characters chosen
for other countries support this: England -> Brightness, Shining; France
-> Religious, Buddha;
Of particular interest in this context is the character for Germany. The
original character, which is still being used in China means Morality,
Virtue, Privilege. The new character used after a reform under American
occupation means: bureaucratic, self righteous and dictatorial depending
on context.
As you can see the "flattening influence" here was american ;-) but you
might perhaps argue that the Germans had deserved the loss of the
character Morality in their country's name, having started two world wars
and all the rest of it.
This is not intended an offense. I myself would probably have left the
Japanese their character for Germany, if just for the sake of
compatibility with Chinese.
************************************************************
Anyway, again trying to get back to the topic L I S P ...
************************************************************
What I would be interested to know the advocate's opinion on LISP is ...
- Will LISP "survive" in a commercial context ?
keywords: licensing problems with LISP images, LISP images reportedly
being too heavy (is this a myth ?) etc.
On the Macintosh for example I was interested in MCL but their licensing
policy, though it makes sense (Subscription based), is likely to put off
anyone but die hard users of the language.
- How competitive is LISP in terms of cross-platform portability ?
I believe the popularity of tools/languages like Perl or Java has to do to
quite some level with the fact, that you can find a "runtime system" for
almost any platform there is, even exotic ones, that pretty much run your
code out of the box with very less or no porting effort.
- Is it easy to find code/docu for boring real-world commercial applications ?
Undoubtedly LISP has a great advantage four AI and Language
processing/design. How is it with public domain examples how to connect to
a telephone exchange and receive call data records in ASN.1 or AMA, parse
them and turn them into billing records, or whatever other boring
commercial application there is - I picked one from my industry here.
I don't doubt that LISP as a programming language will survive (it has
already survived for longer than most other languages). I am not a
developer anymore, I am managing developers to come up with commercially
viable solutions in the telecom industry. I am taking LISP into
consideration as a tool, for two reasons
a) the solutions we provide move towards rule-based systems, that can
quickly be "reconfigured" via rule-sets, rather than recoding, which is
still the norm and makes telecom companies inflexible, the more they
bought from different vendors. Proprietary protocols are still the norm in
telecommunications. The rule-based approach seems as if LISP was a first
choice implementation tool.
b) I had close encounters with LISP back at university many many years
ago, in a math class and my being impressed lasts up to the day some 16
years or so later.
This may speak in favour of LISP as a piece of great technology, already.
However, what counts for survival is whether or not it is commercially viable.
That is what I would wish I could hear the opinion of the LISP advocay
about as one aspect for my decision making whether or not to base a
project such as a mediation system (call collection, validation,
conversion, optional pre- and post processing for billing, distribution to
billing) or a fraud management system (I assume I don't have to explain
what that does).
any comments appreciated
regards
Fernando Mato Mira
> I can't quite reconstruct how the Topic "Is LISP dying?" could have
> possibly eveolved into the fate of Native Americans,
"dying" ?
Bruce R. McFarling
Kowarsch) wrote:
>I can't quite reconstruct how the Topic "Is LISP dying?" could have
>possibly eveolved into the fate of Native Americans,
This is something which has left me amazed.
>however, it is quite interesting how things are being named ...
>The settlers who involved in disgraceful acts against humanity were
>referred to as "Europeans".
>Perhaps, if the subject was history to be proud of, these settlers would
>have been referred to as "Americans".
Actually, the fact that the discussion has been about the
settlers and Native Americans rather than the pioneers and Native
Americans places it into a period when the residents of, e.g., the
British colonies in North America considered themselves English
(Scots, Welsch, etc.) in America.
>This makes me wonder, when did the European settlers actually turn into
>Americans ?
>Just wondering..., no offense intended.
As Crazy Horse said, "my lands are where my dead lie buried".
Add the growing German immigration in the early 1700's, and the
growing numbers of second and third generation residents, and as
allegience to a distant European "mother country" waned, conditions
were ripe for the growth of American identity.
At the very least, while the relationship between the European
settlers and Native Americans on the eastern seaboard were bad (most
American's don't even know what Prince Phillip's war was, and that in
per capita terms it was the bloodier than the Civil War), its seems
short odds that the later American pioneers were worse. After all,
some partial official respect for treaties preventing the settlement
of the eastern Great Lakes was on of the points of friction between
the mother country and the settlers.
How does this tie in with Forth? Is there a parallel in the
dilemma of outnumbered indigenous peoples whether to try to stand
alone (and possibly die out) or integrate (and possibly be lost in the
crowd), and the position of Forth?
That's the only tie in I can see, since as far as I can tell
LISP aint dying. Maybe its the fact that the original question was
relatively straightforward to handle that permitted the thread to
mutate in such a bizarre fashion.
Benjamin Kowarsch
> >however, it is quite interesting how things are being named ...
>
> >The settlers who involved in disgraceful acts against humanity were
> >referred to as "Europeans".
>
> >Perhaps, if the subject was history to be proud of, these settlers would
> >have been referred to as "Americans".
>
> Actually, the fact that the discussion has been about the
> settlers and Native Americans rather than the pioneers and Native
> Americans places it into a period when the residents of, e.g., the
> British colonies in North America considered themselves English
> (Scots, Welsch, etc.) in America.
That's what I thought at first. But then again, there were enough
references suggesting a post independence war period to be included and
certainly the killing of native Americans didn't stop with the US coming
into existence.
Perhaps it is convenient for Americans to call their European brothers for
help when shouldering the burden of their not so heroic parts of history.
Also, I would like to remind you that the notation "English (Scotts,
Welsh)" may have gotten you into trouble in the UK as it could be
construed as the Scotts and Welsh being part of the English, they
vehemently would dismiss any such idea, alternatively, they wouldn't like
to be placed in parentheses if the English seem to dominate over the
content. :-)
it's like writing "the Yankees (Canadians, Mexicans)..."
> How does this tie in with Forth? Is there a parallel in the
> dilemma of outnumbered indigenous peoples whether to try to stand
> alone (and possibly die out) or integrate (and possibly be lost in the
> crowd), and the position of Forth?
Probably that is the message. Hopefully, the indians of the Forth and Lisp
tribes do not get wiped out this time around.
rgds
Bruce McFarling
Kowarsch) wrote:
>That's what I thought at first. But then again, there were enough
>references suggesting a post independence war period to be included and
>certainly the killing of native Americans didn't stop with the US coming
>into existence.
Trying to impose perfect order on a newsgroup thread about
Ameircans and their ancestors killing Native Americans which began
with the question whether LISP is dying?
Anyway, they'd be pioneers. The settler's ``gifts'' to the
Native Americans proved to be the gifts that just kept on giving, and
giving and giving ... though the demographic decline has reversed in
most parts of North and South American in this century.
>Perhaps it is convenient for Americans to call their European brothers for
>help when shouldering the burden of their not so heroic parts of history.
The biggest demographic hit was earliest, as when any
substantially higher density = more disease riddled human population
runs up against a substantially lower density = healthier population.
>Also, I would like to remind you that the notation "English (Scotts,
>Welsh)" may have gotten you into trouble in the UK as it could be
>construed as the Scotts and Welsh being part of the English, they
>vehemently would dismiss any such idea, alternatively, they wouldn't like
>to be placed in parentheses if the English seem to dominate over the
>content. :-)
Certainly more accurate for the 1600s than for the 1700s.
Certainly the 1700s are when a lot of the Scots Irish came over.
>it's like writing "the Yankees (Canadians, Mexicans)..."
More like Yankees (Southerners, Texans). It should have been
written ENglish & Scottish & Welsh. Apologies all around. Like I
want Sean Connery on my case!
>> How does this tie in with Forth? Is there a parallel in the
>> dilemma of outnumbered indigenous peoples whether to try to stand
>> alone (and possibly die out) or integrate (and possibly be lost in the
>> crowd), and the position of Forth?
>
>Probably that is the message. Hopefully, the indians of the Forth and Lisp
>tribes do not get wiped out this time around.
(
----------
Virtually,
Bruce McFarling, Newcastle,
ec...@cc.newcastle.edu.au
)
Larry Elmore
> [Anyone not interested in this off-topic excursion please move down one
page]
>
> > The term was first used to refer to the colonists in the years just
prior to
> > the American Revolution. Before then (when it was used, which was
apparently
> > not common) it referred to the Native Americans.
>
> I was more aiming at the fact, that they were called "Europeans" when they
> did bad things, but probably "Americans" when they had done good things.
I haven't really seen that. During the Indian Wars in the West, I've always
seen them called Americans or (less often) Euro-Americans (which I think is
just to heighten the distinction from Native Americans). African-Americans
were more often associated with the Indians (i.e., runaway slaves), though
after the Civil War the U.S. Army did field some black regiments (both foot
and cavalry) under white officers.
> > > They call us "Oh-Bei-Jin" = European-American-Person(s).
> >
> > My understanding is that an accurate translation of that term is a bit
less
> > flattering than that...
>
> Your understanding is wrong then. The translation is literal:
> "Oh" for Europe, "Bei" for America and "Jin" for Person(s).
I must've been confusing it with another term, then.
Thanks. Off-topic but very interesting.
Larry
Martin Rodgers
nospam-...@xntv.pbz says...
> "English (Scotts, Welsh)"
[good points omitted]
AIUI, that should be Scots. Just the one 't'.
> it's like writing "the Yankees (Canadians, Mexicans)..."
This is why I try to be very relaxed about technical issues. There's
enough _real_ politics to get hot under the collar about. For example,
the island that I live on may sometimes be (incorrectly) called
England, but to some it's also "the mainland". You don't get more
political than that! Until programmers start kneecaping each other,
I'm not going waste any time in language wars.
Lisp and Forth may be minority languages, but then so is any language
not called Cobol. ;) You mentioned Welsh but were you thinking of the
Welsh language? Is that dying? It's a contentious subject.
--
Please note: my email address is munged; You can never browse enough
"There are no limits." -- tagline for Hellraiser
Benjamin Kowarsch
> > "English (Scotts, Welsh)"
> AIUI, that should be Scots. Just the one 't'.
Boy - what a lapsus :-) :-) :-) My apologies. Must have been late... ;-)
> Lisp and Forth may be minority languages, but then so is any language
> not called Cobol. ;)
Very true (infortunately IMHO).
benjamin
CsO
Martin Rodgers wrote:
>> Lisp and Forth may be minority languages, but then so is any language
>> not called Cobol. ;)
>Very true (infortunately IMHO).
ok, this thread has lost it already so i don't
feel too bad about adding more OT stuff...
is this 'more lines of COBOL than all...' bit
actually still true?
ok, when the only competition was FORTRAN,
LISP, ALGOL, PL/1, whatever, i'm sure it was
but in 1999?
naaa!
what do you think (or know)?
Jerry Avins
Old programs never die, never die, never die.
Old programs never die, they don't even* fade away.
*Remove "even" if you want it to scan.
I know a few programmers who have been working on Y2K issues for over a
year. Most of their HLL work has been on COBOL. Some of these programs
are so old that the documentation has been lost, and often nobody knows
all of their functions or interfaces. There are few enough COBOL
programmers left so that one of them came out of retirement to join the
fun. From this anecdotal evidence, I would say that COBOL is more alive
than Latin.
Jerry
--
Engineering is the art | Let's talk about what
of making what you want | you need; you may see
from things you can get. | how to do without it.
---------------------------------------------------------
Bruce McFarling
Kowarsch) wrote:
>> > "English (Scotts, Welsh)"
>
>> AIUI, that should be Scots. Just the one 't'.
>
>Boy - what a lapsus :-) :-) :-) My apologies. Must have been late... ;-)
Hey, yeah! Even if I parenthesised my ancestors incorrectly, I
spelled them good!
I promise I won't tell anyone, though.
Benjamin Kowarsch
> > is this 'more lines of COBOL than all...' bit
> > actually still true?
> > ok, when the only competition was FORTRAN,
> > LISP, ALGOL, PL/1, whatever, i'm sure it was but in 1999?
COBOL is *still* being used for new implementations of billing software
these days. Also, COBOL data structures and databases are being used
(CODASYL).
Take your phone bill or utilities bill as example. The chance is, that it
has been created by COBOL code. One strong incentive to use COBOL for
billing is the built in support of BCD (binary coded decimals), which
ensures there is no inaccurracy intruduced when converting numbers between
decimal and binary.
There is only very few languages who support that, such, that writing
arithmetic expressions can be done using infix notation. In many languages
there is no BCD at all and it would have to be bolted on and the libraries
rewritten from scratch. I was once taking part in the standardisation of
Modula-2 and had proposed BCDs to be specified in the standard so the
language could have been an alternative to using COBOL. Unfortunately, the
notion in the WG was such, that there would have been no infix expressions
with BCDs, so I withdrew my proposal, as it didn't make sense under these
circumstances.
LISP integers is about the only thing, that comes to my mind to offer
something to the needs of billing people in this regard (usually only two
decimal digits are required, so you just multiply everything by 100), also
ratios are helpful.
But unlike many LISP people, COBOL and billing software developers are
often people with an accounting background, they are not computer language
scientists. They are more likely to think in procedural ways than in OO
and they would have a severe problem with LISPs syntax. If someone would
write a language on top of LISP to take bookkeeper's accounting statements
as source, along with some features that make a transition from COBOL
easy, many people would embrace it.
Though I personally don't like it, I expect COBOL to continue a long life.
> I know a few programmers who have been working on Y2K issues for over a
> year. Most of their HLL work has been on COBOL. Some of these programs
> are so old that the documentation has been lost, and often nobody knows
> all of their functions or interfaces. There are few enough COBOL
> programmers left so that one of them came out of retirement to join the
> fun.
All this is true. Even worse. For many programs there is no source code.
They have been maintained for decades by patching their executables.
However, the Y2K bug is not really COBOL's fault. You can define date
fields to accommodate more than two digits. But, remember who these COBOL
programmers were: Accounting people. They knew memory was expensive and
they heard the cash register ringing every time they declared a variable,
hence the notion to shorten that where it felt appropriate.
> From this anecdotal evidence, I would say that COBOL is more alive than Latin.
You'd be surprised how alive Latin is. I remember math classes at
university, especially analytical geometry where our professors
recommended tons of books for us to read and the only one that was neither
in Ancient Greek nor in Latin would have been someting in French by Blaise
Pascal. Not a single recommendation for a book in English and many of
those books didn't have a publicly accessible translation at all. The
Greek ones all had translations into Latin, though. ;-)
Lingua latina vivanda est ;-) -- no guarantees for grammatical correctness ;-)
Steve
>
> CsO wrote:
> >
> > Benjamin Kowarsch wrote...
> > Martin Rodgers wrote:
> > >> Lisp and Forth may be minority languages, but then so is any language
> > >> not called Cobol. ;)
> > >Very true (infortunately IMHO).
> >
> > ok, this thread has lost it already so i don't
> > feel too bad about adding more OT stuff...
> >
> > actually still true?
> > ok, when the only competition was FORTRAN,
> > LISP, ALGOL, PL/1, whatever, i'm sure it was
> > but in 1999?
> > what do you think (or know)?
>
> Old programs never die, never die, never die.
> Old programs never die, they don't even* fade away.
>
> *Remove "even" if you want it to scan.
>
> year. Most of their HLL work has been on COBOL. Some of these programs
> are so old that the documentation has been lost, and often nobody knows
> all of their functions or interfaces. There are few enough COBOL
> programmers left so that one of them came out of retirement to join the
> than Latin.
>
> Jerry
----------------------------------
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit
Litora multe ille et terris jactatus et alto
Qui superum saevae memorem Junonis ab iram
Nope, stil works...
-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rst...@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com:/pub/user/rstevew
-Electronics Site!! 1000 Files/50 Dirs!! http://www.armory.com/~rstevew
Europe Naples Italy: http://ftp.unina.it/pub/electronics/ftp.armory.com
Stig Hemmer
> However, the Y2K bug is not really COBOL's fault. You can define
> date fields to accommodate more than two digits.
There is a standard command to get the current date in COBOL. This
command returned 2 digits for the year. There is _no_ standard way of
getting the current century in COBOL.
There is a new ANSI COBOL standard in the works, which among other
things includes system support for four-digit years. This standard
has an ETA of some time next year...
I assume this is a standard which codifyies existing practice, so that
people can fix this already. The timing is still ironic. :-)
Stig Hemmer,
Jack of a Few Trades.
PS: I read a COBOL text book last revised in 1993. It contained no
mention of the Y2K problem anywhere. Sigh.
Lieven Marchand
> Take your phone bill or utilities bill as example. The chance is, that it
> has been created by COBOL code. One strong incentive to use COBOL for
> billing is the built in support of BCD (binary coded decimals), which
> ensures there is no inaccurracy intruduced when converting numbers between
> decimal and binary.
>
> There is only very few languages who support that, such, that writing
> arithmetic expressions can be done using infix notation. In many languages
> there is no BCD at all and it would have to be bolted on and the libraries
> rewritten from scratch. I was once taking part in the standardisation of
> Modula-2 and had proposed BCDs to be specified in the standard so the
> language could have been an alternative to using COBOL. Unfortunately, the
> notion in the WG was such, that there would have been no infix expressions
> with BCDs, so I withdrew my proposal, as it didn't make sense under these
> circumstances.
>
Ada has complete support for this type of thing, so you could have
stayed in the Pascal family ;-)
I find it odd Ada has not been more successfull for things like
accounting, billing systems, etc. It's practically designed for it.
--
Lieven Marchand <m...@bewoner.dma.be>
If there are aliens, they play Go. -- Lasker
Jerry Avins
>
> > > is this 'more lines of COBOL than all...' bit
> > > actually still true?
> > > ok, when the only competition was FORTRAN,
> > > LISP, ALGOL, PL/1, whatever, i'm sure it was but in 1999?
>
> these days. Also, COBOL data structures and databases are being used
> (CODASYL).
>
> has been created by COBOL code. One strong incentive to use COBOL for
> billing is the built in support of BCD (binary coded decimals), which
> ensures there is no inaccurracy intruduced when converting numbers between
> decimal and binary.
>
I'm confused about the need for BCD. Surely, there can be no ambiguity
when converting (scaled) integer values to and from decimal notation for
I/O. Making the scaling factor 1000 to keep track of mils still leaves
room for representing plenty of dollars in a 32-bit signed int. (Few
transactions exceed 2 million.) By using a double, Forth can represent
in a single number more money that the treasuries, budgets, or debts of
most countries. What's the problem?
>
> benjamin
>
> --
> As an anti-spam measure I have scrambled my email address here.
> Remove "nospam-" and ROT13 to obtain my email address in clear text.
Please clue me in about ROT13.
Jerry Avins
>
> On Wed, 04 Aug 1999 02:32:01 GMT, Samuel A. Falvo II <kc5...@dolphin.openprojects.net> wrote:
>
> Whoops. In my prior post, I had forgotten about the utterly brain-dead (as
> far as I'm concerned, outright BUG) behavior of the WITHIN ANSI Forth word.
> Therefore, to make a CORRECT version of WITHIN, please prepend the following
> definition, like so:
>
> ( This definition inherits from the existing ANSI definition of WITHIN )
> : WITHIN (a b c -- f ) 1+ WITHIN ;
>
> Alternatively, you could make the following adjustments to retain ANSI
> compatibility:
>
> >: LowercaseLetter? ( ch -- f ) [CHAR] a [CHAR] z WITHIN ;
>
> : LowercaseLetter? ( ch -- f) [CHAR] a [CHAR] z 1+ WITHIN ;
>
> >: A..M? ( ch -- f ) ToUppercase [CHAR] A [CHAR] M WITHIN ;
> >: A..Z? ( ch -- f ) ToUppercase [CHAR] A [CHAR] Z WITHIN ;
>
> : A..M? ( ch -- f ) ToUppercase [CHAR] A [CHAR] M 1+ WITHIN ;
> : A..Z? ( ch -- f ) ToUppercase [CHAR] A [CHAR] Z 1+ WITHIN ;
>
> All other program code remains the same. I apologize for any confusion this
> may have caused.
>
> ==========================================================================
> KC5TJA/6 | -| TEAM DOLPHIN |-
> DM13 | Samuel A. Falvo II
> QRP-L #1447 | http://www.dolphin.openprojects.net
> Oceanside, CA |......................................................
Thanks for the code, and particularly the algorithm. There was no
confusion, as I saw both posts at the same time.
I want to defend WITHIN as it stands. If it has a flaw, it is the name,
but I can't think of a better one. It works with signed and unsigned
numbers provided that you are consistent, and it executes much faster
(at least when assembly coded) than a more intuitive version would. Here
is my version in 69HC11 code for MAXforth, which lacked one:
CODE WITHIN ( n lo-limit hi-limit+1 -- f ) \ 101 cycles
18EC , 00 C, \ LDD 0,Y hi
18A3 , 02 C, \ SUBD 2,Y sub lo
18ED , 00 C, \ STD 0,Y hi - lo
18EC , 04 C, \ LDD 4,Y n
18A3 , 02 C, \ SUBD 2,Y sub lo
18A3 , 00 C, \ SUBD 0,Y sub hi - lo
1808 , \ INY
1808 , \ INY
1808 , \ INY
1808 , \ INY
24 C, 06 C, \ BCC no
CC C, -1 , \ LDD -1
7E C, FE47 , \ JMP NEXTSD
\ no
CC C, 0 , \ LDD 0
7E C, FE47 , \ JMP NEXTSD
It would take a few more cycles to replace "hi-limit+1" with "hi-limit"
in the stack comment. Since it is frequently used with constant
arguments, they can often be adjusted at compile time, and extra code so
isn't worth while.