cyber_sur...@wildcard.demon.co.uk (Cyber Surfer) writes: > I'm looking for a Lisp that supports ISAPI. At the moment > the only compilers I know that directly support ISAPI are > VC++ 4.2 and Amzi! Prolog, but if you know of a Lisp that > can do this too, then I'd like to know how I can get a > copy of it.
If the ISAPI API is available as C or C++ header file and is implemented in a .DLL, you can use Ilog Talk's C++ binding tool to automatically generate a Lisp interface to it. Ilog Talk is fully ported to Windows 95 and NT, includes a Lisp-to-C compiler, and supports the generation of DLLs containing Lisp code.
For more information, send mail to i...@ilog.co.uk or check out our Web site at <URL:http://www.ilog.com/>.
-- Harley
------------------------------------------------------------------- Harley Davis net: da...@ilog.com Ilog, Inc. tel: (415) 944-7130 1901 Landings Dr. fax: (415) 390-0946 Mountain View, CA, 94043 url: http://www.ilog.com/
>> In article <joswig-0809962225460...@news.lavielle.com> >> jos...@lavielle.com "Rainer Joswig" writes: >>(refering to windows) >> platform I use, which supports the features I need,
>Which features do you need?
>What would you expect from a vendor? Be specific. Maybe if they >understand the demand they could target the market better.
We have been specific in saying over and over. Those of us who have to program for the PC _need_ a truely windows aware Lisp: we need OCX capability, true OLE compatability, dynamic linking to the system's DLLs, and for a price somewhere low side of $500. Until this happens, Lisp will remain what it is: a very good language for building huge monolithic vertical apps on large systems. And I'll still be stuck with Visual Basic because my wife and I happen to like to eat evry day.
In article <51cou2$...@grandcanyon.binc.net>, wle...@mailbag.com (William
A. Barnett-Lewis) wrote: > We have been specific in saying over and over. Those of us who have to program > for the PC _need_ a truely windows aware Lisp: we need OCX capability, true > OLE compatability, dynamic linking to the system's DLLs, and for a price > somewhere low side of $500.
Sounds interesting. If I'd use a PC I'd certainly would like to have it. Would there be a market for it? How big? What do you think?
: >>(refering to windows) : >> platform I use, which supports the features I need, : > : >Which features do you need? : > : >What would you expect from a vendor? Be specific. Maybe if they : >understand the demand they could target the market better.
: We have been specific in saying over and over. Those of us who have to program : for the PC _need_ a truely windows aware Lisp: we need OCX capability, true : OLE compatability, dynamic linking to the system's DLLs, and for a price : somewhere low side of $500. Until this happens, Lisp will remain what it is: : a very good language for building huge monolithic vertical apps on large : systems. And I'll still be stuck with Visual Basic because my wife and I happen : to like to eat evry day.
I'd like to chime in that those of us who program with free UNIX tools program in g++ or Perl and tcl/Tk because of their virtues: portability, solidity, and a rich set of primitives. In C/C++, these advantages are almost a given, but there's no fundamental reason why Lisp can't be as good as tcl/Tk. It just isn't, AFAIK. There are only so many programs which can be written using only Common Lisp or Scheme/SLIB library functions. Tcl/Tk and Perl are both pretty nasty languages IMHO, but the implementatation is so good (and partly as a consequence, they are so widely available) that I end up using them regularly.
I last tried Scheme ports of the Tk toolkit (guile and STk) about a year ago, and they were respectively unusable and usable but slightly flaky. tcl/Tk and Perl have been portable and solid and useful for a long time. Why is it hard to find their like in the Lisp world? I don't know how hard it is to create and support such a package, but it's strange that people are motivated to do it outside the Lisp world. (I haven't tried scsh, maybe I should..)
It's IMHO a tragedy that John Ousterhout didn't use Scheme instead of a warmed-over shell language as the basis of tcl. I think the result would probably have been even more successful than tcl/Tk: the command-line syntax could be the same (by eliding the outer parentheses if necessary), but the programming semantics would be enormously improved. With large programs in the native language a practical proposition, who knows how far it could have gone?
If the functionality of Tk version 3.6 and/or Perl version 4.0.19 (i.e. the versions documented in the Ousterhout and Wall/Schwartz books) were available as libraries for a reasonably stable, friendly free Common Lisp or Scheme or ML implementation (e.g. clisp, or scm if it had a debugger, or perhaps smlnj) I think a *lot* of free lisp/ml software would be written. Until that occurs, large free programs will by and large be written in C/C++, and smaller ones in Perl or tcl/Tk.
Bill Newman
PS. I haven't seen anything about guile on the Scheme newsgroup for a while. Does that mean that it's not going anywhere or that people have decided that guile doesn't belong there?
PPS. Perhaps I am excessively critical of STk. It was a pretty impressive package, and it is probably more impressive now. However, it did occasionally lock up in various odd ways on my plain vanilla Linux machine. (I've *never* had such a problem with tcl/Tk or Perl -- they have always preserved the integrity of the interpreter no matter what programming errors I made.) It's also a little ugly the way that it mechanically translates the syntax of the Tk interface into Scheme, and unfortunate that it preserves the the man-page-based tcl/Tk documentation (which is IMHO the worst implementation feature of the tcl/Tk package).
In article <842633726...@wildcard.demon.co.uk>, Cyber Surfer wrote: >If the Sun people who created Java didn't know Lisp, then they >could be forgiven for making the mistakes they did. If they knew >Lisp and _still_ designed it so badly, then I'm not so sure. It >might even be possible that some people might prefer Java to Lisp, >even after using Lisp. It wouldn't suprise me. However, I'm hoping >that Java will introduce a few non-Lispers to ideas that may lead >them eventually to Lisp.
A recent Addison Wesley catalog lists "The Java Series."
"The Java Language Specification" is by James Gosling, Bill Joy, and Guy Steele. The first line of blurb indicates: "Written by the inventors of the Java technology..."
If memory serves correctly, Gosling is the one after whom Gosling Emacs is named. That was rather LISP-based, was it not?
And Guy Steele is the author of Common Lisp: The Language (Digital Press). Of course, he's also jointly responsible for "H+S" aka "C: The Reference Manual," which makes him something of a heretic from a LISP standpoint. (Keep your smiley on here.)
Bill Joy is not so notable in the LISP world; he's more notable for developments with Sun, vi, and BSD UNIX. -- Christopher B. Browne, cbbro...@unicomp.net, chris_bro...@sdt.com Web: http://www.conline.com/~cbbrowne SAP Basis Consultant, UNIX Guy Windows NT - How to make a 100 MIPS Linux workstation perform like an 8 MHz 286
In article <wkd8zq2ja5....@laura.ilog.com> da...@laura.ilog.com "Harley Davis" writes:
> If the ISAPI API is available as C or C++ header file and is > implemented in a .DLL, you can use Ilog Talk's C++ binding tool to > automatically generate a Lisp interface to it. Ilog Talk is fully > ported to Windows 95 and NT, includes a Lisp-to-C compiler, and > supports the generation of DLLs containing Lisp code.
Excellent. I'll dig out my postscript printer...
> For more information, send mail to i...@ilog.co.uk or check out our > Web site at <URL:http://www.ilog.com/>.
Been there, seen it. I didn't see any references to platforms, and I've yet got around to setting up my printer again (I rare _ever_ print anything, these days). I know, Ghostscript is available,and I've installed several different versions, most of which failed to work. As a result, I tend to ignore postscript docs simply to save time - as my sigfile says, you can never browse enough.
So, I'll try to overcome my aversion to displaying docs on paper. ;)
Thanks. -- <URL:http://www.enrapture.com/cybes/> You can never browse enough Future generations are relying on us It's a world we've made - Incubus We're living on a knife edge, looking for the ground -- Hawkwind
In article <51cou2$...@grandcanyon.binc.net> wle...@mailbag.com "William A. Barnett-Lewis" writes:
> We have been specific in saying over and over. Those of us who have to program > for the PC _need_ a truely windows aware Lisp: we need OCX capability, true > OLE compatability, dynamic linking to the system's DLLs, and for a price > somewhere low side of $500. Until this happens, Lisp will remain what it is: > a very good language for building huge monolithic vertical apps on large > systems. And I'll still be stuck with Visual Basic because my wife and I happen > to like to eat evry day.
Indeed. We need these things because our competitors use them. If we don't also use them, then we lose our competitive edge. Developing for Windows is almost entirely a race to use the latest tools. It's scary.
No wonder so few Windows developers use Lisp. Even if LispWorks and ACL for Windows supported all the latest SDKs from MS, most Windows developers might still ignore them, simply because they're too busy trying to keep up with the tools they're already using. Switching to Lisp would give them no edge at all, as they'd first have to learn a whole new language. VB only succeeded because it offered a better way of developing for _Windows_ - in many other respects it offers _less_ than C++.
We're in the privileged position of knowing Lisp in spite of this. In my case, it was because I discovered Lisp whilst unemployed. I had the time and the motivation to learn more about it, but I suspect that such curiousity as mine may be rare amoung other PC (DOS & Windows) developers.
I've been trying to stir up some people here, too if there were people like myself, dissatisfied with what the current crop of Lisp implementations (for Windows) offer. It appears that either most of us prefer to remain silent, or most Lisp programmers really do want the kind of Lisps that are available.
Right now, I'd love a Visual Scheme (see Visual Prolog, Visual Basic, Visual C++, and even Visual J++). It should be possible, but if somebody were to tell me that it just wouldn't be viable commercially, then I'd understand. However, that's not what I've been told. Instead, I got the message that this is the wrong way to use Lisp. <sigh>
Roll on Dylan. It's more likely that Dylan programmers will be able to look at this issue with more open minds. After all, wasn't Dylan intended to introduce a few new ideas into Lisp? That's all I'm trying to do (in a much more modest way), by asking some questions about the lack of interest in fully exploiting a certain platform.
Is that such a strange thing to want to do? -- <URL:http://www.enrapture.com/cybes/> You can never browse enough Future generations are relying on us It's a world we've made - Incubus We're living on a knife edge, looking for the ground -- Hawkwind
In article <joswig-1409961203090...@news.lavielle.com> jos...@lavielle.com "Rainer Joswig" writes:
> > We have been specific in saying over and over. Those of us who have to > program > > for the PC _need_ a truely windows aware Lisp: we need OCX capability, true > > OLE compatability, dynamic linking to the system's DLLs, and for a price > > somewhere low side of $500.
> Sounds interesting. If I'd use a PC I'd certainly would like > to have it. Would there be a market for it? How big? > What do you think?
We may never know, unless somebody tries it. Has it been done yet? If Lisp does indeed make programmers more productive, then it would appear that a market _does_ exist.
If I appear to be negative about Lisp, it's only because I see so many examples of negative thinking keeping Lisp where it is today, in an ivory tower, used by elitists. Remember the Smalltalk balloon on the cover of the August 1981 issue of Byte? I do. What we don't see in that picture is the tether keeping the ballon from escaping from the ivory tower. -- <URL:http://www.enrapture.com/cybes/> You can never browse enough Future generations are relying on us It's a world we've made - Incubus We're living on a knife edge, looking for the ground -- Hawkwind
In article <wnewmanDxq27z....@netcom.com> wnew...@netcom.com "Bill Newman" writes:
> I last tried Scheme ports of the Tk toolkit (guile and STk) about a > year ago, and they were respectively unusable and usable but slightly > flaky. tcl/Tk and Perl have been portable and solid and useful for a > long time. Why is it hard to find their like in the Lisp world? I > don't know how hard it is to create and support such a package, but > it's strange that people are motivated to do it outside the Lisp > world. (I haven't tried scsh, maybe I should..)
Believe it or not, but I tried to install STk today. I've not yet found the installation instructions, if there are any. They _should_ be obvious, in a file called install.txt, like so many other free software tools. I've no idea why it won't run yet, and since I'm very short of disk space at the moment, I removed the files. When I get a new drive, or some more time, then I'll try again.
I wasn't impressed. No doubt I'd feel differently if it came with an install program and STk was running a few minutes after using it. I'd _pay_ for a good tool that I could use, and STk could perhaps be such a tool, but I can't pay for an easy installation.
Fortunately, I'm patient enough to try again. Sometimes a 'free' lunch is worth spending a little time on.
> It's IMHO a tragedy that John Ousterhout didn't use Scheme instead of > a warmed-over shell language as the basis of tcl. I think the result > would probably have been even more successful than tcl/Tk: the > command-line syntax could be the same (by eliding the outer > parentheses if necessary), but the programming semantics would be > enormously improved. With large programs in the native language a > practical proposition, who knows how far it could have gone?
I seem to recall that his justification of tcl is that a lot of people use it, so it must be good. This is a fair argument. It must have some value. I don't like tcl much, and I hope I never have to use it, which is very likely. I can very easily avoid Tk, too, and since I have no compelling reason to use it, I may succeed in doing that.
Is Tk really so great that I should spend time learning how to use it? Possibly, but nobody is demanding that I should, while there are many other tools that I have damn good reasons to learn about and use.
Perhaps this would be different if I used Unix for a living. ;) It's one of those little accidents. The problem, for me at least, is that I'm far from alone.
> If the functionality of Tk version 3.6 and/or Perl version 4.0.19 > (i.e. the versions documented in the Ousterhout and Wall/Schwartz > books) were available as libraries for a reasonably stable, friendly > free Common Lisp or Scheme or ML implementation (e.g. clisp, or scm if > it had a debugger, or perhaps smlnj) I think a *lot* of free lisp/ml > software would be written. Until that occurs, large free programs > will by and large be written in C/C++, and smaller ones in Perl or > tcl/Tk.
Sadly, yes. People use C++ because they can. It's there, and C++ vendors make great efforts to make their compilers as easy to use as possible. For many tasks, Perl is even more useful. Lisp and ML are better languages, but the implementations available, at least for the platforms available to me, aren't packaged in such an attractive and friendly manner.
This might not seem important to some people, but that's why tools like VB and HyperCard are so popular.
> PS. I haven't seen anything about guile on the Scheme newsgroup for a > while. Does that mean that it's not going anywhere or that people > have decided that guile doesn't belong there?
I know even less about Guile.
> PPS. Perhaps I am excessively critical of STk. It was a pretty > impressive package, and it is probably more impressive now. However, > it did occasionally lock up in various odd ways on my plain vanilla > Linux machine. (I've *never* had such a problem with tcl/Tk or Perl > -- they have always preserved the integrity of the interpreter no > matter what programming errors I made.) It's also a little ugly the > way that it mechanically translates the syntax of the Tk interface > into Scheme, and unfortunate that it preserves the the man-page-based > tcl/Tk documentation (which is IMHO the worst implementation feature > of the tcl/Tk package).
I don't find that encouraging, but thanks.
These days, I prefer documentation in HTML. It now looks like even MS have been converted - they're replacing their help engine with HTML technology. Could the days of man pages be running out?
Hmm. I dunno. ;) -- <URL:http://www.enrapture.com/cybes/> You can never browse enough Future generations are relying on us It's a world we've made - Incubus We're living on a knife edge, looking for the ground -- Hawkwind
In article <slrn53lbvs.iul.cbbro...@wolfe.brownes.org> cbbro...@unicomp.net "Christopher B. Browne" writes:
> If memory serves correctly, Gosling is the one after whom Gosling Emacs is > named. That was rather LISP-based, was it not?
I've no idea - I've only used Emacs very briefly, but I'm told it uses Lisp. So that would answer my question about whether or not these people know of Lisp.
> And Guy Steele is the author of Common Lisp: The Language (Digital Press). > Of course, he's also jointly responsible for "H+S" aka "C: The Reference > Manual," which makes him something of a heretic from a LISP standpoint. > (Keep your smiley on here.)
I have both CLtL1 (pb) and CLtL2 (hb).
> Bill Joy is not so notable in the LISP world; he's more notable for > developments with Sun, vi, and BSD UNIX.
That name is also familiar. Thanks for answering my question.
BTW, I don't recall reading about these people and their connection with Java in any of the magazines I read, dispite the many references to Java. All I remember reading was that _Sun_ created Java. I guess the assumption is either that most people won't know who these people are, or they won't care.
Magazines tend to make assumptions like that - as I've said already, Byte appear to stopped reviewing Lisp systems. I hope I'm wrong and that they've changed that habit since I stopped regularly reading the mag. It could be that they _did_ review a Lisp during the last few years, but I just missed it.
Anyway, thanks. It doesn't change the point I was making, which is that Java is missing a lot of important Lisp-like features, like closures. Odd how some people are _adding_ these things to Java, isn't it? Why didn't the designers of Java do that themselves? Tsk.
Still, in a few years it might not matter. The Kawa compiler might take over from Java. It should... -- <URL:http://www.enrapture.com/cybes/> You can never browse enough Future generations are relying on us It's a world we've made - Incubus We're living on a knife edge, looking for the ground -- Hawkwind
>> We have been specific in saying over and over. Those of us who have to >program >> for the PC _need_ a truely windows aware Lisp: we need OCX capability, true >> OLE compatability, dynamic linking to the system's DLLs, and for a price >> somewhere low side of $500.
>Sounds interesting. If I'd use a PC I'd certainly would like >to have it. Would there be a market for it? How big? >What do you think?
>Rainer Joswig
Look at like this: What kind of market did Borland find for Delphi (sp?), a rehash of Turbo Pascal that actually works & better than VB at that. It won't be able to take the whole windows developer market, but even a few percentage points of market share equals lots of $$$$ very quickly. I'd love to ditch VB & VC++. Right now, I can't; no other tool will do what I need on a day to day basis. This is the most aggrivating thing about it; the market exists, but not where they ( the lisp companies) are looking.
> It's IMHO a tragedy that John Ousterhout didn't use Scheme instead of > a warmed-over shell language as the basis of tcl. I think the result > would probably have been even more successful than tcl/Tk: the > command-line syntax could be the same (by eliding the outer > parentheses if necessary), but the programming semantics would be > enormously improved. With large programs in the native language a > practical proposition, who knows how far it could have gone?[more deleted.]
> Bill Newman
Yes, it's a tragedy but one has to remember that John was probably not out to save the world. He wrote a tool that was useful to his folks and figured others might want it as well, as I far as I can tell from his book anyway.
TCL does have two qualities that made it good for his purposes: 1) it is easy to link with outside C programs and to call from C. 2) it resembles the Unix shell enough to allow "wish" and "tclsh" to function as shells.
| I've no idea - I've only used Emacs very briefly, but I'm told it uses | Lisp. So that would answer my question about whether or not these | people know of Lisp.
could you list the Lisp systems and Lisp or Lisp-based environments you have actually used? my impression is that you have not used _any_.
#\Erik -- those who do not know Lisp are doomed to reimplement it
cyber_sur...@wildcard.demon.co.uk (Cyber Surfer) writes: > > If memory serves correctly, Gosling is the one after whom Gosling Emacs is > > named. That was rather LISP-based, was it not?
> I've no idea - I've only used Emacs very briefly, but I'm told it > uses Lisp. So that would answer my question about whether or not > these people know of Lisp.
It's my impression that the original Gosling EMACS was implemented in TECO (Text Editor and COrrector) as a set of macros (EMACS stands for Editor MACroS).
GNU EMACS, written by Richard Stallman, was the first to implement EMACS on a "LISP substrate".
-- Tim Olson Apple Computer, Inc. (t...@apple.com)
| It's my impression that the original Gosling EMACS was implemented in | TECO (Text Editor and COrrector) as a set of macros (EMACS stands for | Editor MACroS). | | GNU EMACS, written by Richard Stallman, was the first to implement | EMACS on a "LISP substrate".
it's the other way around. AI Memo 555 of 1981-10-02 is the Emacs Manual for Twenex Users by Richard M. Stallman. this is the TECO-based Emacs. I used it for a few years, myself, until they (the evil "they") retired the DECsystem-20. a few years later, I used a Gosling-derived Emacs on PRIME systems.
#\Erik -- those who do not know Lisp are doomed to reimplement it
In article <3051773881154...@naggum.no> e...@naggum.no "Erik Naggum" writes: > | I've no idea - I've only used Emacs very briefly, but I'm told it uses > | Lisp. So that would answer my question about whether or not these > | people know of Lisp.
> could you list the Lisp systems and Lisp or Lisp-based environments you > have actually used? my impression is that you have not used _any_.
I can't remember them all, but I'd start with XLISP and Cambridge Lisp, on the Atari ST. I was impressed by the later, as a compiled program could run as fast as any other compiled language on that machine (as far as I could tell without using benchmarks), _and_ make full use of the GUI (GEM).
I've also used several SCM ports for Windows, MIT Scheme for Windows, and ACL for Windows.
Ok, the list is not as great as some people here (15+? My list is nowhere near that number), but I never claimed that it was. In fact, I've pointed out my lack of experience with Lisp. I may have written a couple of Lisp interpreters and very crude compiler for a _very_ small subset of Scheme, but I realise that this is very different from creating a full Lisp system.
In case anyone had any doubts, I've been speaking for the last few week or two as a Windows developer, more than a Lisp developer. I _know_ that the requirements of these two kinds of developer are very different - that's my point! They _are_ different. Radically different. I'm just wondering why this should be, and _any_ damn fool can do that.
Could it be that Windows developers are just ignorant fools, and deserve all the pain and frustration that they endure simply coz they're in the job? I don't accept that. I'm more inclined to believe that there's a media conspiracy created by mass advertising, from vendors like MS, selling C++ compilers and telling developers that C++ is THE ONE TRUE WAY.
It also seems more likely that the lack of interest from Lisp vendors in offering a Lisp system for Windows that can compete with VC++, VB, etc. Perhaps there's simply no demand for such a system, which suggests that either C++ programmers have yet to discover the joys of using Lisp, or those joys are imaginary. Judging by my own experiences with Lisp, I'd say that they're real enough.
The sudden popularity of Java suggests to me that there are programmers hungry for "change", i.e. an alternative to C++. I wonder how many of those Java converts would embrace Lisp, if they only knew it existed and could offer them something even _better_ than Java?
Who will tell them? I might, but I'm not experienced enough with Lisp to offer my own experience as "evidence", or argue effectively in favour of Lisp. In comp.lang.lisp, we all know Lisp is THE ONE TRUE WAY, and I've seen people offer CS papers to disprove the myths used to attack Lisp. I know where some of these papers are, but it's not my nature to argue with such hostile people. (Remember the media con?) These unfortunate programmers have been brainwashed, and I'm not sure _I_ want to try "deprogramming" them.
I'm still working on my Lisp to C compiler, but it won't be "ready" this year. It won't produce anything more than pretty feeble code, and it won't begin to compete with the "visual" development tools being sold in vast numbers by commercial interestes like MS, Borland, Symantec, etc. If I can create a tool that _I_ can use, that'll be a start, but it won't necessarily help anyone else, and I don't even know how much use it'll be to myself.
That's why I keep looking for a commercial alternative to my own feeble efforts. And lo! Behold Dylan! Perhaps all I have to do is wait...It seems I'm not alone after all!
I'm a Dylan convert, and all I've used so far is Mindy, and on a Win32 platform, it doesn't even use a GUI. Still, _in theory_ I could use it to write CGI code. I may like that much more than using MzScheme. In practice, I'll be expected to use C++, because that'll be able to exploit ISAPI.
How many Lisps have I used? Quite a lot, considering that I'm forced to use a platform with so few Lisps available for it, and some of them are hard to find. -- <URL:http://www.enrapture.com/cybes/> You can never browse enough Future generations are relying on us It's a world we've made - Incubus We're living on a knife edge, looking for the ground -- Hawkwind
t...@apple.com (Tim Olson) writes: > It's my impression that the original Gosling EMACS was implemented in > TECO (Text Editor and COrrector) as a set of macros (EMACS stands for > Editor MACroS).
> GNU EMACS, written by Richard Stallman, was the first to implement > EMACS on a "LISP substrate".
Almost right. Gosling EMACS was the first C emacs; dunno what macro structure it uses/used. Stallman wrote the first EMACS in TECO, and later migrated it to the C/Lisp combination we know (and love?) today. -- Graham Hughes (gra...@resnet.ucsb.edu) finger for PGP key ``Unix is many things to many people, but it's never been everything to anybody.'' Home page at: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ghughes/
Cyber Surfer wrote: > Could it be that Windows developers are just ignorant fools, > and deserve all the pain and frustration that they endure > simply coz they're in the job? I don't accept that. I'm more > inclined to believe that there's a media conspiracy created > by mass advertising, from vendors like MS, selling C++ compilers > and telling developers that C++ is THE ONE TRUE WAY. > It also seems more likely that the lack of interest from > Lisp vendors in offering a Lisp system for Windows that can > compete with VC++, VB, etc. Perhaps there's simply no demand > for such a system, which suggests that either C++ programmers > have yet to discover the joys of using Lisp, or those joys > are imaginary. Judging by my own experiences with Lisp, I'd > say that they're real enough.
I'm a windows hater, and I'm not Lisp-literate (although I do read Scheme, so I'll eventually learn Lisp). I do happen to have some info which might be helpful.
I'm a Forth person, and I happen to know of a Forth interpreter which might do just what you want (I mean that you might be able to use the info in it to do what you want).
Win32Forth, by Tom Zimmer, can interactively call any DLL in the windows system. Look it up at www.taygeta.com. It's free, but I have no idea what its licence is.
Good luck.
-Billy Who REALLY wants to see an equivalent interactive environment (indeed, ANY interactive environment) for PC-Geos. I don't know enough about Scheme/Lisp to do it, but I do know that those two would be some of the best choices, due to the odd way in which Geos manages memory-- you have to check memory out (using a handle) before you can use it. Anybody wanna help? You'll gain a few more programmers for the Lisp/Scheme cause, including some very good ones who are currently tied up on applications.
In article <3051429384347...@arcana.naggum.no>, Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> wrote:
>if you were a gourmet chef, I can imagine you incessant complaints about >how McDonald's and Burger King and Pizza Hut and all those junkfood places >grow, instead of creating wonderful menus. but as far as I can understand, >you are not a gourmet chef, either, you're just a McDonald's and Burger >King and Pizza Hut customer who's pissed that you can't get gourmet food >for one dollar a meal, who waltzes into some gourmet restaurants every few >days to tell all the customers that they are doomed because McDonald's and >Burger King and Pizza Hut are "marching on" and while you have never even >dreamed of actually paying to eat at any of the places, you clamor on about >their being doomed.
Well, let's turn that analogy around a bit.
We want a cup of coffee.
So we go to the Common LISP gourmet restaurant, and they say: Sure, we can give you a cup of coffee. It'll be lovely freshly ground full bodied coffee, the best you've ever tasted. However, you have to have a three course meal with dessert as well.
So we try the Scheme diner, and they say: Well, we got rid of the three course meal and dessert, and we have some fantastic fresh Guatemalan coffee beans; they're beautiful and shiny, individually polished even, and they smell really good too. We also have six or seven different plans for making a grinder, and we've got some clay and a kiln to make a cup with...
So we ask at the Java market stall, and they say: Well, we can't offer you a cup of coffee, but we can offer you a picture of some dancing coffee beans. Someone's announced that they'll be releasing a grinder real soon now, and we're building a cold fusion reactor to heat the water with. Oh, but for safety reasons you can't have any hot liquids in cups.
So reluctantly, we go back to the C/C++ Burger King, and they make us a cup of instant coffee with non-dairy creamer. And it tastes pretty foul, but it is at least roughly what we wanted.
> it's the other way around. AI Memo 555 of 1981-10-02 is the Emacs Manual > for Twenex Users by Richard M. Stallman. this is the TECO-based Emacs. I > used it for a few years, myself, until they (the evil "they") retired the > DECsystem-20. a few years later, I used a Gosling-derived Emacs on PRIME > systems.
... but not even Gosling-EMACS was the first one, if my memory serves me right, the first EMACS implementation on a lisp substrate was made on a Multics machine, some time in the seventies. Of course, the MIT-Lisp machines also had an EMACS written in lisp. -- (Rmz)
Bj\o rn Remseth !Institutt for Informatikk !Net: r...@ifi.uio.no Phone:+47 22855802!Universitetet i Oslo, Norway !ICBM: N595625E104337
cyber_sur...@wildcard.demon.co.uk (Cyber Surfer) writes: >Believe it or not, but I tried to install STk today. I've >not yet found the installation instructions, if there are >any. They _should_ be obvious, in a file called install.txt, >like so many other free software tools.
The installation instructions are at the top of the file `README' in the top-level directory when you unpack the files. I think that's pretty obvious, don't you?
-- Matthew McDonald m...@cs.uwa.edu.au "Like most functions in the standard C library most MPI functions return an integer error code. However, like most C programmers, we will ignore these return values in most cases." -- User's guide to MPI
In article <meta19960915235...@pobox.com>, m...@pobox.com (mathew) wrote: > In article <3051429384347...@arcana.naggum.no>, > Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> wrote: > >if you were a gourmet chef, I can imagine you incessant complaints about > >how McDonald's and Burger King and Pizza Hut and all those junkfood places > >grow, instead of creating wonderful menus. but as far as I can understand, > >you are not a gourmet chef, either, you're just a McDonald's and Burger > >King and Pizza Hut customer who's pissed that you can't get gourmet food > >for one dollar a meal, who waltzes into some gourmet restaurants every few > >days to tell all the customers that they are doomed because McDonald's and > >Burger King and Pizza Hut are "marching on" and while you have never even > >dreamed of actually paying to eat at any of the places, you clamor on about > >their being doomed.
> Well, let's turn that analogy around a bit.
> We want a cup of coffee.
> So we go to the Common LISP gourmet restaurant, and they say: Sure, we > can give you a cup of coffee. It'll be lovely freshly ground full > bodied coffee, the best you've ever tasted. However, you have to have > a three course meal with dessert as well.
> So we try the Scheme diner, and they say: Well, we got rid of the > three course meal and dessert, and we have some fantastic fresh > Guatemalan coffee beans; they're beautiful and shiny, individually > polished even, and they smell really good too. We also have six or > seven different plans for making a grinder, and we've got some clay and > a kiln to make a cup with...
> So we ask at the Java market stall, and they say: Well, we can't offer > you a cup of coffee, but we can offer you a picture of some dancing > coffee beans. Someone's announced that they'll be releasing a grinder > real soon now, and we're building a cold fusion reactor to heat the > water with. Oh, but for safety reasons you can't have any hot liquids > in cups.
Therefore, we have the ability to pour hot liquid directly down your throat continously, causing you to be so busy choking...er, drinking that you don't have time to do anything else.
> So reluctantly, we go back to the C/C++ Burger King, and they make us a > cup of instant coffee with non-dairy creamer. And it tastes pretty > foul, but it is at least roughly what we wanted.
Then you hear about the Dylan cafe, which advertises a wonderful, perfect, rich cup of espresso, but when you get there, they tell you they're going out of business but you can have a free sample of some of their half-brewed stuff that's been sitting in the pot for a while. It tastes pretty good, even though it's cold and hard to drink from that awkward revised infix styrofoam cup (the masses just don't like ceramics, you see), but you will never get any more of it (except vicariously by reading about it in a Harlequin romance), so you're on your way back to the Burger King.
At which time you spy, out of the corner of your eye, a place called "The Smalltalk Bistro"...
In article <3051773881154...@naggum.no> e...@naggum.no "Erik Naggum" writes: > could you list the Lisp systems and Lisp or Lisp-based environments you > have actually used? my impression is that you have not used _any_.
I forgot to mention CLISP, but I don't know how. Perhaps I was thinking exclusively of GUI based Lisps. While I understand that CLISP does have GUI support for some platforms, all I have is the DOS port. I _have_ used it.
The first version of my index compiler was written using CLISP, later rewritten in Scheme, using SCM, and finally the original CL version was updated, using ACL for Windows. Alas, the index is no longer maintained, and so I no longer use the index compiler. -- <URL:http://www.enrapture.com/cybes/> You can never browse enough Future generations are relying on us It's a world we've made - Incubus We're living on a knife edge, looking for the ground -- Hawkwind
cyber_sur...@wildcard.demon.co.uk (Cyber Surfer) writes: > Anyway, thanks. It doesn't change the point I was making, which > is that Java is missing a lot of important Lisp-like features, > like closures. Odd how some people are _adding_ these things > to Java, isn't it? Why didn't the designers of Java do that > themselves? Tsk.
Actually, as far as I know the next version of Java does include closures. You can define an embedded class anywhere, even in a method body, and it accesses lexically defined variables like a closure.
-- Harley
------------------------------------------------------------------- Harley Davis net: da...@ilog.com Ilog, Inc. tel: (415) 944-7130 1901 Landings Dr. fax: (415) 390-0946 Mountain View, CA, 94043 url: http://www.ilog.com/
