> In my lexical environment, using properties is a non-symbolic > action, because the Lisp:symbol is then no longer used as a > Computation:symbol, but as a record.
True. Organising data in lists is, to me, not a symbolic activity. There is nothing anti-symbolic in it either, though, whereas the use of property lists - while arguably orthogonal with the symbolic use of symbols - is itself a non-symbolic use of symbols that tends to muddle the notion of symbolicity.
> Starting a brand new thread out of flames that died down a long time ago > is a good way to get people to exercise their kill file option > and a bad usenet post.
Oops! Your are right. I have been away for a long time, and forgot to check the dates on the articles. It just seemed one of the posts in the (still active) thread.
> "Biep @ http://www.biep.org/" <reply-...@my-web-site.com> wrote: > > In my lexical environment, using properties is a non-symbolic > > action, because the Lisp:symbol is then no longer used as a > > Computation:symbol, but as a record.
> True. Organising data in lists is, to me, not a symbolic activity. There > is nothing anti-symbolic in it either, though, whereas the use of property > lists - while arguably orthogonal with the symbolic use of symbols - is > itself a non-symbolic use of symbols that tends to muddle the notion of > symbolicity.
No, you missed my point. Lists are untyped and arbitrarily sizeable. But one can still treat them as fixed-size and with fixed-type slots. And it's still "list processing" by the standards of some.
> Does anybody else deem a comp.lang.lisp.common group a good thing?
My understanding of newsgroup procedure is that you are first supposed to show that there is adequate traffic and only then spawn a new group, not create new groups in anticipation of traffic. CL is discussed here and properly so. If there is ssubstantial demand to discuss something else, I suggest those other things should identify with [MYLISP] or [YOURLISP] or whatever in the subject-line. If it looks like we have a sustained number of these things, as opposed to just a few threads, we could talk about spawning a whole new group.
I personally don't perceive a problem with the present situation, though. We have sometimes referred people to other, more appropriate, groups when such groups exist. I don't think we've told anyone who has no group to post to that they're just out of luck.
> A Schemer would't speak of "tail call elimination" (which would main > e.g. turning them into non-tail calls),
Okay, the thing with terminology is that if there are two potentially obvious meanings, and one is insane, you should give the people using the term the benefit of the doubt and figure they mean the non-insane meaning. "Tail call elimination" doesn't mean eliminating the "tail" part, it means eliminating the "call" part.
-- /|_ .-----------------------. ,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war | ,--' _,' | Wage class war! | / / `-----------------------' ( -. | | ) | (`-. '--.) `. )----'
On Thu, 9 May 2002 17:50:12 +0200, Biep @ http://www.biep.org/ <reply-...@my-web-site.com> wrote:
> In my experience there haven't been many flamefests, except that someone > stating (with arguments) "I prefer this specific Scheme feature" gets > attacked. If this is a CL-specific group, probably rightly so, but
What makes you think that it is right to attack another person verbally, just because he or she states that "I prefer..."?
>> ... Eg Arabic ihtimal (probability) >> can be turned into muhtemel (probable) using Arabic rules, but >> not into ihtimalli(?) using Turkish rules.
Biep> What would you feel if you heard it? "Shudder, wrong! No Biep> Turk would say that!", or "Typical for an uneducated Biep> person"?
Depends, I wouln't shudder because I spend enough time back there to hear the langauge to be used to people speaking "wrong." I'd probably interject "muhtemel" possibly with simultaneous eye-rolling if the person is younger. 45+ year olds should get it right and if they don't it would be indicative of education/social class so I would keep my mouth shut. It really is a stupid rule, but it is one.
Biep> Of course the 'h' labels the word as quite audibly Biep> non-Turkish, I gather..
I did not know that! But couldn't find a counter-example.
[...] Biep> What does -irt mean? It seems to be derived directly from Biep> yogmak..
I was hoping you wouln't call me on that. I don't know quite where that suffix comes from. I don't think it is "irk" though, I am thinking "kopmak"->"kopuk" as being derived the same way. I am pretty sure the root is "yogusmak" though.
>> I don't know where Ozan got the Turks/Scheme aptitude idea
Biep> Oh, that is not from Ozan - I once read a discussion by some Biep> other Turks on this, but I haven't remembered their names.. Biep> Sorry if I gave the impression that Ozan held this position.
No you didn't, I was confused. My apologies to Ozan.
> > A Schemer would't speak of "tail call elimination" (which would main > > e.g. turning them into non-tail calls),
> Okay, the thing with terminology is that if there are two potentially > obvious meanings, and one is insane, you should give the people using > the term the benefit of the doubt and figure they mean the non-insane > meaning.
> > In my experience there haven't been many flamefests, except that someone > > stating (with arguments) "I prefer this specific Scheme feature" gets > > attacked. If this is a CL-specific group, probably rightly so, but
> What makes you think that it is right to attack another person > verbally, just because he or she states that "I prefer..."?
> It is not.
Perhaps not, but since this is a virtual forum, physical assault is out of the question.
* "Biep @ http://www.biep.org/" <reply-...@my-web-site.com> | But why should comp.lang.scheme have to suffer?
Because the only people who are interested in Scheme vs Common Lisp are those who are interested in Scheme. Nobody else could possibly care.
| In my experience there haven't been many flamefests
Of course, your experience is such a wonderful basis upon which to form intelligent opinions, since you just came out of nowhere to attack me viciously. We must assume that your concept of what people have a right to discuss includes such vicious, unprovoked attacks. In other words, you are stark raving mad and should be locked up, or at least ignored. -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.
70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific process.
"Joe Marshall" <prunesqual...@attbi.com> writes: > Perhaps not, but since this is a virtual forum, physical assault > is out of the question.
if memory serves, one infamous usenet poster has, on occasion, called other hostile parties to a duel with their choice of weaponery. he was known to be an expert marksman. i don't think anyone took him up on his offer. :) [also, state of massachusetts does not issue duelling permits]
oz --- you take a banana, you get a lunar landscape. -- j. van wijk
> > A Schemer would't speak of "tail call elimination" (which would main > > e.g. turning them into non-tail calls),
> Okay, the thing with terminology is that if there are two potentially > obvious meanings, and one is insane, you should give the people using > the term the benefit of the doubt and figure they mean the non-insane > meaning. "Tail call elimination" doesn't mean eliminating the "tail" > part, it means eliminating the "call" part.
Take it easy - I should have labelled the parenthesised part with a smiley..
But in fact you don't want to eliminate the call either: the second function needs to be called.
What you don't want is to introduce a useless return frame. In a standard rewriting implentation, no such stack frame turns up unless you perform what Schemers tend to call "tail call pessimisation", i.e. you have to go out of your way to make a tail call INefficient. All I meant to say was that the notion "tail call elimination" in the context of Scheme rests on a false premiss, to wit that there is something nasty that needs to be eliminated, whereas the whole nasty something simply doesn't turn up in the first place.
On Thu, 9 May 2002 17:50:12 +0200, I (Biep) wrote: > In my experience there haven't been many flamefests, except that someone > stating (with arguments) "I prefer this specific Scheme feature" gets > attacked. If this is a CL-specific group, probably rightly so, but "Stefan Schmiedl" <s...@xss.de> wrote in message
> What makes you think that it is right to attack another person > verbally, just because he or she states that "I prefer..."?
> It is not.
All right, "attacked" may have been too strong a word. Let me (partly re-) state my position:
(1) If postings are inappropriate, it is probably correct to confront the prepetrator, if necessary including a reprimand.
(2) Verbal abuse, such as calling others fools or idiots, is in principle totally unacceptable to me. - This is a place to discuss ideas and opinions, maybe passionately; not people - Anybody posting here is obviously from that fact not an idiot in the clinical sense. Therefore calling someone an idiot is meant to hurt (and it DOES hurt). Comparable arguments hold for many of the other terms used in verban abuse.
(3) Even though I do not accept verbal abuse: - This is an unmoderated forum, where something doesn't and shouldn't simply go away because I or somebody else would like so. Therefore the correct option, I think, is to filter the content to include only what one wants to read, e.g. through the use of kill files. - I know that there exist several disorders, the most common of which probably is BPD, that make people behave badly even while they may basically be nice people. One can try to react in an appropriate manner (http://www.bpdcentral.com/nook/puvas.htm), which may still boil down to filtering. (BTW, a small self-test is on http://www.4degreez.com/misc/personality_disorder_test.mv).
But if some of the heat can be removed by creating another newsgroup, why not?
> If there is substantial demand to discuss something else [than CL], > I suggest those other things should identify with [MYLISP] or > [YOURLISP] or whatever in the subject-line. If it looks like we > have a sustained number of these things, as opposed to just a few > threads, we could talk about spawning a whole new group.
> I personally don't perceive a problem with the present situation, though.
All right, I'll try to mention Scheme in the title whenever appropriate. (But I do have some anecdotal evidence - emails I received about a year ago - that some people have refrained from comparing CL and Scheme here because of the verbal abuse.)
> A few years ago I bought the German translation of ``ANSI Common Lisp'', > and in the chapter about macros they always mixed up tick (') and > backtick (`).
I had something comparable once when I wrote a review of a CL book (Lisp Style and Design it was, I think): the typesetter had switched all the keyword colons with the preceding space, because (s)he supposed the colons were meant to go with the preceding words.. And of course I wasn't asked to proofread.
> In a standard rewriting implentation, no such stack frame turns up > unless you perform what Schemers tend to call "tail call pessimisation", > i.e. you have to go out of your way to make a tail call INefficient.
> All I meant to say was that the notion "tail call elimination" in the > context of Scheme rests on a false premiss, to wit that there is something > nasty that needs to be eliminated, whereas the whole nasty something simply > doesn't turn up in the first place.
I don't know what you mean by `standard rewriting implementation', but I can assure you that proper tail recursion *is* an issue in many Scheme implementations. These two papers,
Marc Feeley, James S. Miller, Guillermo J. Rozas, Jason A. Wilson. "Compiling Higher-Order Languages into Fully Tail-Recursive Portable C". département d'informatique et r.o., Université de Montréal. Rapport technique 1078. Aout 1997.
and
Miller, James S. and Guillermo J. Rozas. "Garbage Collection is Fast, But a Stack is Faster". MIT AI Lab. AIM-1462. March 1994.
address this issue. The first is a comparison of various techniques used by Scheme -> C compilers to ensure proper tail recursion. The authors note that among diverse implementations, the `cost' of supporting tail recursion amounts to about a factor of two.
The second paper compares traditional technique of allocating continuations on the stack to the currently popular technique of allocating them on the heap. The conclude that using a stack can be up to three times faster than using a heap for allocating continuation frames.
Both of these papers illustrate that using a stack is an important implementation technique. However, using a stack will make your program non-tail recursive unless you make the effort to free the continuation frame before the tail call, i.e., you perform `tail call elimination'. (Note that if you design the hardware right, you can get the benefits of both the stack and the heap without the drawbacks of either.)
> "Biep @ http://www.biep.org/" <reply-...@my-web-site.com> asked: > > Does anybody else deem a comp.lang.lisp.common group a good thing?
> "Kent M Pitman" <pit...@world.std.com> replied > news:sfwk7qdrw0y.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com... > > If there is substantial demand to discuss something else [than CL], > > I suggest those other things should identify with [MYLISP] or > > [YOURLISP] or whatever in the subject-line. If it looks like we > > have a sustained number of these things, as opposed to just a few > > threads, we could talk about spawning a whole new group.
> > I personally don't perceive a problem with the present situation, though.
> All right, I'll try to mention Scheme in the title whenever appropriate. > (But I do have some anecdotal evidence - emails I received about a year > ago - that some people have refrained from comparing CL and Scheme here > because of the verbal abuse.)
I personally have to say I think it's flamebait unless you say why you are doing it. The communities enjoy a healthy separation because they disagree in fundamental ways on very core value issues.
While I do not _think_ I plan to "verbally abuse" you (partly, one never knows what others will classify as verbal abuse), I do not consider point-by-point feature comparisons appropriate in this forum to be a productive use of anyone's time unless you think you have a specific and achievable goal.
I personally think (and it's just my opinion) that you should post remarks about Scheme on the Scheme newsgroup, and remarks about CL on the CL newsgroup, and that any overlapping remarks should be framed in terms of an action you want to have happen. If you don't have a specific action in mind, then you are probably whipping people into a frenzy over nothing, and that is the nature of what people call 'flamebait'.
> But if some of the heat can be removed by creating another > newsgroup, why not?
because distance increases misundertanding in this case. (there are cases where the opposite is true, but figuring out what is appropriate c.l.l traffic and how to handle variations is best done in the open.)
if you take the analysis presented and apply it universally, the net effect on society is to increase intolerance, which has the usual sad consequences. more importantly, it is impossible to apply universally, anyway, so the (doomed to fail) attempts to do so lead to cynicism in reformed optimists, instead of letting these optimists perhaps infect others.
In an attempt to throw the authorities off his trail, Thien-Thi Nguyen <t...@glug.org> transmitted:
> "Biep @ http://www.biep.org/" <reply-...@my-web-site.com> writes: >> But if some of the heat can be removed by creating another >> newsgroup, why not?
> because distance increases misundertanding in this case. (there > are cases where the opposite is true, but figuring out what is > appropriate c.l.l traffic and how to handle variations is best > done in the open.)
There would indeed be new "fights" started; we'd see "splinter factions" like:
-> Those that think Scheme is pretty much satanic, and should have no association at all with the name "Lisp";
-> Those that think Common Lisp is pretty much satanic, and that there should be no association betwixt it and Scheme
-> Those that feel equally strongly that there _should_ be an association;
Those three groups _do_ exist, are of significant size, and pretty much guarantee that there will be some strife. The result of an attempt to divide them up would work out for the first two groups, but the third would draw the lot back into the fray when it comes time to wonder about the differences between Scheme and Lisp from a "non-aggressive" perspective. -- (reverse (concatenate 'string "ac.notelrac.teneerf@" "454aa")) http://www.cbbrowne.com/info/x.html "A good system can't have a weak command language." -- Alan Perlis [This explains why MS-DOS and Windows can't possibly be good systems...]
* "Biep @ http://www.biep.org/" <reply-...@my-web-site.com> | (1) If postings are inappropriate, it is probably correct to confront the | prepetrator, if necessary including a reprimand. | | (2) Verbal abuse, such as calling others fools or idiots, is in principle | totally unacceptable to me. | - This is a place to discuss ideas and opinions, maybe passionately; | not people
Then why do you attack me viciously the way you do? You have provided some clues: you are a deeply religious person and appear to believe that the ethics you demand of others does not apply to yourself at all. This is the kind of evil that mankind has had to deal with for ages, usually by having to kill the religious morons. This still goes on. Please move to a country where they would treat you like you deserve.
| - Anybody posting here is obviously from that fact not an idiot in the | clinical sense. Therefore calling someone an idiot is meant to hurt (and | it DOES hurt). Comparable arguments hold for many of the other terms | used in verban abuse.
No, idiot, it is an indication that the behavior displayed, such as your behavior and hypocrisy, is that of an idiot, and that if that person wishes _not_ to appear to be an idiot, he better change it. You would never understand this, because you have already given enough clues to suspect that you think you areare always the righteous guy and everybody else is wrong. Thus your hypocrisy is not even a problem to you.
| But if some of the heat can be removed by creating another newsgroup, why | not?
Why not shut the fuck up with your hypocrisy and just go away, instead? -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.
70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific process.
> news:sfwk7qdrw0y.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com... > If there is substantial demand to discuss something else [than CL], > I suggest those other things should identify with [MYLISP] or > [YOURLISP] or whatever in the subject-line.
> I personally have to say I think it's flamebait unless you say why you > are doing it. The communities enjoy a healthy separation because they > disagree in fundamental ways on very core value issues.
Well, my personal stance is that there are too few live varieties of Lisp around, and that new ideas can grow from confronting varieties. But that is not the point here: I may be wrong, or someone else may have a quite different reason for comparing the two. The point seems to me that there are three options:
(1) Exclude certain subjects from discussion on Usenet. This seems to me very much against the nature of Usenet, and not a good idea, esp. if the subjects are not proven to be worthless. (2) Discuss them in the CL or Scheme (or even more inappropriate) newsgroups. This is bound to generate a lot of heat, as you seem to agree, and probably goes against the charter of either group. (3) Let them have a place of their own. This was my proposal.
Do I understand correctly that (1) is your opinion (with "certain subjects" being 'non-action-oriented CL/Scheme comparisons')?
> There would indeed be new "fights" started; we'd see "splinter > factions" like: > -> Those that think Scheme is pretty much satanic, and should have > no association at all with the name "Lisp"; > -> Those that think Common Lisp is pretty much satanic, and that > there should be no association betwixt it and Scheme > -> Those that feel equally strongly that there _should_ be an > association;
> Those three groups _do_ exist, are of significant size, and pretty > much guarantee that there will be some strife. The result of an > attempt to divide them up would work out for the first two groups, but > the third would draw the lot back into the fray when it comes time to > wonder about the differences between Scheme and Lisp from a > "non-aggressive" perspective.
I still should see two advantages, corresponding to different meanings of the word "removed" as used in my original sentence: (1) This strife would occur in another newsgroup than the CL and Scheme groups, and therefore not bother the monolinguals (in preference if not in ability). (2) Some of the satanists from either party would not visit the overall group, so their oil would stay out of the fire altogether.
[In fact, several hierarchies have specific advocacy groups where people who like it hot can go. Personally I am not interested in advocacy in that sense, but it does show that Usenet has ways to deal with even that kind of demand.]
* "Biep @ http://www.biep.org/" <reply-...@my-web-site.com> | (3) Let them have a place of their own. | This was my proposal.
Look, web dude, just create a web forum where you can attack people out of the blue, which you seem to prefer to do when you are not instigating trouble among groups of people who would prefer to be apart, and where you can exclude people and topics all you like. That is, after all, the only reason you want your own newsgroup. Go away, now, web boy. -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.
70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific process.
> but I can assure you that proper tail recursion *is* an issue > in many Scheme implementations.
I don't disagree with that, but I consider these problems to be primarily related to the optimisation techniques used, not to the notion of tail calling per se. Of course the use of a call stack is a pretty common kind of optimisation, but it is still something that in my mind should be separated out. Using a stack is not inherent in the notion of evaluating a Lisp expression.
But I agree one can defend the other view by taking an applied, as opposed to theoretical, stand.
