Lisp - A group of general purpose computer programming languages originally
designed in the 1950s and early 1960s by J. McCarthy of MIT.  Lisp is an
acronym for List Processing. Adopted for AI (Artificial Intelligence)
research and development in the 1960s and 1970s,  Lisp quickly evolved as
new computational techniques were developed.  Lisp's  main features are;
symbolic processing; uniform and extensible syntax; its interactive
(compiled and interpreted) development model; a rich set of built-in data
types; dynamic memory management; and support for most programming styles.

Modern Lisp Dialects: Common Lisp, Scheme, GNU Emacs Lisp, ISLISP, EuLisp,
AutoLisp.

Of course this use of the term power is not really helpful, but I
think this kind of confusion is one reason why it's *bad* to use the term.
`expressive' seems better to me.

  How does the fact that someone _might_ have chosen something else affect
  the _actual_ losses when a particular choice was made?  Suppose I steal a
  car, travel somewhere, and return it before the owner needs it (so as to
  eliminate the silly counter-argument that software can be copied at no
  cost and without affecting the original).  Can I now argue that this act
  of theft must be acceptable because if I had had to pay for the car under
  normal rules and circumstances, I might have taken public transportation?

  In my view, the question is not at all what somebody does or does not
  "lose" in some trivial monetary terms.  The question is whether you have
  the _right_ to do what you do.  The owner of something laid down some
  rules and principles for how to obtain (a copy of) that something, in a
  society that has laid down rules and principles for what kinds of rules
  and principles an owner can lay down for those who wish to obtain that
  something.  If you violate the owner's rules and principles for obtaining
  that something, it is _wrong_ no matter what.  If the owner has violated
  the rules and principles of the society in which this takes place, you
  _still_ have no right to violate the owner's conditions.  The only thing
  you should do in case you or your society does not approve of the rules
  and principles of obtaining that something is to stay the hell away from
  that owner and not even _want_ whatever he is trying to push.  Owners of
  something you might want who are too stupid to give you reasonable ways
  to obtain it or who attempt to violate the conditions of your society or
  even of your society as you would _like_ it to be, should be shunned and
  _not_ be given signals that what they have to offer is worth obtaining.

  However, since many people are unprincipled when faced with sufficient
  temptation degree and are usually not aware of any ethical principles at
  all unless they benefit from them, indeed _have_ no ethics if they feel
  they have a reason to be morally outraged, such as if they feel unfairly
  treated, which _would_ happen with a stupid owner who breaks community
  expectations if you want to obtain their stuff, a sufficiently "clever"
  owner with sufficient disrespect for his users, for society, and for the
  rules and principles under which he is expected to operate, might make a
  killing leading ignorant and not too bright youngsters into temptation by
  making it _possible_ to break their rules and get away with it.  Since
  Bill Gates has proven to be one of those _presumedly_ intelligent people
  (but read his "books") who think they are so smarter than everybody else
  thay have no qualms at all flaunting the rules and principles of society,
  he built an empire on the immoral and criminal tendencies of people who
  were too weak to withstand temptation and too dumb to realize what he was
  doing to their respect for the rights of owners of anything they want.
  This is why there have always been so many bad people in the Microsoft
  camp, stealing software, breaking copy protections, spreading viruses,
  breaking standards and community recommendations, using C++, etc, and why
  this lawless company has been found guilty of abusing its monopoly power.

  There are probably few ethical and principled people left in the computer
  industry because of Microsoft's success in being so unethical, but it did
  not take much scrutiny of or thinking about the behavior of Microsoft
  back in the early 1980s to see that the boss and the company were playing
  by the rules of criminals and had no intention of becoming good citizens.
  Indeed, both Bill Gates and the whole senior Microsoft management are and
  have been so fantastically paranoid and competitive that that should give
  _everybody_ an important clue to their plans.  I always wonder why people
  get defrauded when it takes no real effort to figure out that it cannot
  be anything but fraud, but some people have figured it out and more: How
  to _exploit_ those suckers.  Bill Gates is one of those people. and He is
  a damn good con man, but it only works on people who are willing to
  dispense with ethics to get something they want -- immature people who
  have not yet developed an understanding of what values they hold or how
  to protect them, in this case teenage boys with no social clue and
  probably very little to gain respect from others save through their
  technical prowess with some advanced toy.  Getting teenage boys to want
  something and break some rules to get it is not particularly hard.
  Exploiting it to the extent that Bill Gates and Microsoft has done is not
  particularly brilliant, nor a stroke of genius, it only requires an
  _absolute_ lack of respect for other people, and that kind of lack of
  respect is a communicable disease that has infected too many people in
  the computer industry -- even the Free Software proponents who think that
  people inside and especially outside _their_ community can be exploited
  for their ends, too: those who _demand_ that something that others have
  created be available for free, lest they _steal_ it, who do not want to
  use "non-free" software because they have a severely misguided idea of
  what their values are, and who argue in favor of stealing using so bogus
  arguments that they should be ashamed of themselves.  In the end, we have
  _not_ regained that ethical standing that is required to defeat the fraud
  and his billion-dollar company, but infected another part of the software
  industry that was very _principled_ in its objections and its ideas in
  the past.  Now that it has a much wider following, the lack of principled
  followers must be expected, but it is still sad to see it happening.

"powerful" cannot mean Turing equivalent, it has to mean expressive
power. (I just made that up.) Meaning given two languages which are
t/equiv, if i can express my semantics ten times faster in one then it
is ten times more powerful (as long as it is also fast, which Lisp is).

anyway, after we get the definition straight we should post it in java
and C++ ng's and invite comment. :)

Pick a fight. Gabriel (LUGM '99) tossed that idea out and everybody
chuckled, but it is probably the best way to spread the word. As a
matter of fact, if we hit the Perl and Python ngs at the same time we
could really make some headlines.

I say we find someone solid with a thick skin and a sense of humor and
have them walk point, everybody else backs them up with
facts/info/references/experience stories/code samples/whatever. We need
expertise on the languages we go after as on LIsp.

Oh, and we'll have no truck with this different languages for different
purposes moral relativistic garbage. Lisp is Best, period. :)

IMHO, a powerful programming language is one that has a wide variety of
control and data structures.  Examples of non-powerful languages are early
versions of BASIC (data structures were just numbers, strings, and arrays;
control structures were just IF-GOTO, FOR loops, and subroutines with no
parameters) and Fortran (similar to BASIC except subroutines accepted
parameters).

Java and C++ are both very powerful languages.  We may not think they're
*as* powerful as Lisp (an opinion that I think many of their proponents
might argue against), but as language power goes they're closer to the top
of the spectrum than the bottom.

The problem with expressivity in these languages is primarily their cryptic
syntax, *not* so much their lack of power.

Kent> Yes.  But then it should be ggpl.  I think it's rude for it to
Kent> take the utterly generic term "general public licenses" for
Kent> something so specific.  

Someone could make the same objection about "Common" in "Common Lisp".
Note that I am not objecting, I am merely noting the parallel so a
long-winded defense is not necessary for me.

I'll repeat for emphasis the one paragraph of my article that you
chose not to respond to:

  I think that if you are going to ask an encyclopedia to honor one
  communities definition of itself, "equal justice" implies you should
  honor another community's definition of itself as well.

IP (intellectual property) is a weird concept, and not everyone agrees
on what it is and whether it has a right to exist at all &c.  (My DOS
argument was one of the common arguments in favor of the concept.)

It is not at all clear that it is possible to "own an idea".

In fact, you will find that in the first copyright cases the authorities
declaring the author's exclusive right to the creation were defensive
(wrt the obvious argument that copyright limits the rights of the
individuals) and stressed the time limits on copyright as well as the
necessity to protect the author's income.

Both of these issues (time limits and author's income) parameters are
now discarded (US extends copyright duration by 5 years every 5 years,
so nothing created after 1923 will go into PD; since copyright can be
owned by a corporation, authorship has now nothing to do with
copyright) because of the pecuniary issues of corporate profits.

Nevertheless, the bottom line is that IP is _not_ the same kind of
property as a car or a computer, at least not legally.  Suffice it to
say that there is a concept of PD and (theoretically) copyright
expiration.

IANAL

kenny
clinisys

 define-control-construct critical-method { body } :: {
  turn_off_interrupts()
  ##body##
  turn_on_interrupts()
 }

or something like that.  IMO this makes Lisp fundamentally more
powerful than any other (currently existing) language.

Another example: no other language allows you to define new syntax
for the parser, which in turn allows you to embed new kinds of data
descriptions inside your code, rather than forcing you to place any
text that doesn't conform to the (fixed) lexical syntax of the language
either inside a string or in a separate file that must be processed
at run time rather than at compile time.  The problem here is not that
C's syntax is cryptic, but rather that it is non-extensible.

  Intellectual property does not refer to ideas, only their _expression_.
  Nobody has _ever_ in the history of intellectual property made any claim
  to own an _idea_.  For instance, patents, which prevent an independent
  invention from being exploited commercially, does _not_ prevent anyone
  from writing books on the ideas underlying the invention, nor from using
  it to create new inventions.  Quite the contrary, that is the purpose of
  patents -- to make them open and known -- that is what "patent" means.
  The purpose of granting commercial rights to copyright holders (apart
  from any moral rights) is also to ensure that people are encouraged to
  publish their ideas.  Society benefits greatly from _not_ letting people
  "own" ideas, and obviously so.  I find it very strange that those who
  talk about the ill effects of intellectual property do not care enough to
  know that it expressly does not deal with "owning ideas".  As far as the
  intellectual property laws are concerned, owning an idea is not possible.

| Nevertheless, the bottom line is that IP is _not_ the same kind of
| property as a car or a computer, at least not legally.

  I hope two books I have read recently can help those who have an urge to
  be opinionated on the issue of intellectual property get a better grip on
  what they are talking about:

        Paul Goldstein
        International Copyright : Principles, Law, and Practice
        http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195128850

        David R. Koepsell
        The Ontology of Cyberspace : Philosophy, Law, and the
        Future of Intellectual Property
        http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0812694236

  Incidentally, intellectual property is considered hard to understand.  I
  do not understand why, but then I have always been looking at it from the
  point of view of the creator and the obvious right he has to control the
  distribution of his work -- ultimately by simply withholding it -- not
  the consumer who generally has nothing to offer the creator but money,
  and the requirements that a decent society can put on the consumer such
  that those who can create something, _anything_ of value, are encouraged
  to do so, precisely for the benefit of those consumers, but also such
  that other creators can build on what has gone before them instead of
  having to develop everything from first principles themselves.  If the
  consumers gets "rights" to the works of the creators, the only effect is
  to seriously limit the incentives of creators to do significant work, and
  the only new creations will be trivial consumer modifications that are
  worth what the consumers can get in return for their effort.  Most of
  those who are both creator and consumer will not figure this out until
  they can no longer get paid for their creative work and can no longer buy
  (copies of) any new creative works that would have cost so much to create
  that millions of consumers must pay for it, and the former consequence
  will happen to small-time creators a long before the latter affects the
  big-time entertainment industry, but it will dry out from the bottom up:
  It is already damn hard to _start_ making money in entertainment and it
  will not get easier when nothing but the largest outfits make money, and
  that process of favoring big business will come about because people do
  not understand how today's intellectual property laws protect the small
  creators against the big ones.  I believe the only reason consumers want
  control over the published works of creators is simple greed, but greed
  pays off only in the short run, killing off the source of the value that
  greedy people only _want_.

The folks of the US MPAA and RIAA seem to be indicating that they wish
to claim to own all sorts of ideas.

If you make, and publish, anything that generally seems to resemble
Mickey Mouse, you're liable to find some folks from The Disney Company
submitting some legal papers suggesting that you Cease And Desist...

...

If I release software without restricting anyone's rights to use,
study, modify, and redistribute the software, so far so good ...

Now, if MegaBucks, Inc., comes along and takes my free software, puts
it in their product, and releases it *with* restrictions on the users'
rights to study, modify, etc., then the software isn't free anymore
(as released by MegaBucks).

I know that some people here have argued that only entities with free
will can be free, but please consider what "free software" means from
the standpoint of the users.  It's software that doesn't restrict
their rights.  (Except one, namely their ability to restrict others'
rights with regard to the software.)

If MegaBucks has done that to my public domain software, how is the
software more free than if I had said, "and by the way, you don't have
the right to take these rights away from other people," when the only
possible purpose of the omission of that stipulation is for the
software to become less free?

The right to take away the rights of others is special, in that its
exercise always makes the software less free.  For that reason, this
is the one right that, in being denied, increases the overall freedom
of *all* the users of any given piece of software.

--
--Ed Cashin                     integrit file-verification system:
  ecas...@terry.uga.edu         http://integrit.sourceforge.net/

You're basically restricting things I can do with it because they are not
compatible with your personal view.

In "free speech" this would be analogous to saying "you can do anything you
want with speech, but you must not advocate that speech not be free".  That
would not be free speech.

Further, if MegaBucks, Inc. makes something from your code, then there are
two components to it:  the parts they made (and they should be entitled to
dictate the use of that, since it's theirs, not yours) and the parts you made
(and they should be entitled to use that however they wanted if it were free;
only if you made it not really truly free could you control how they used it).

I am new to this GPL-LGPL stuff, but IIUC the conduct of MegaB has no
effect on our relationship. I think this understanding is correct,
because you qualified your comment with "(as released by MegaBucks)".
Well, what do I need that for? Your version is still free.

Puzzled...

proc critical_method {body} {
  turn_off_interrupts
  uplevel 1 $body
  turn_on_interrupts

(This excludes using I/O: you can probably show that it is TE if you
are allowed to use files as a tape for a TM.)

Of course this brings out both how silly the TE requirement is, and
how somehow useful it can be - you can obviously solve very real
problems in FORTRAN, including probably arbitrarily good simulations
of large physical systems like people; yet having recursion would be a
significant win for people writing FORTRAN (and it probably does have
it now of course).