Could somebody use SCSH, Sheme, or Lisp to create the "Lispm" architecture.
Franz Kafka
uses Lisp, Scheme, or ScSh to create a Lisp Machine.
One possilbe Lispm is
vlee.sourceforge.net
and there was also talk about an Explorer II emulator.
How hard would it be to turn a Linux box into a Scheme/Lisp machine.
Are there any OS's that are written in Lisp/Scheme?
Could Linux be ported from C into Lisp/Scheme, and would this
constitute a Lispm.
Please help with a Lisp/Scheme based OS.
If one were freely available, and more people started using and liking
it, it could cause a rebirth of the Lisp Machine--just like Linux
caused the
rebirth of UNIX.
The only important thing is to not tie the Lispm to a specific chip,
or Machine like Symbolics, LMI, Xerox, TI, and the Scheme Chip did but
to make it able
to run on all hardware--so that more people could try it out.
Porting Linux into a Lisp/Scheme OS would be a great start.
Tom Lord
Is there any OpenSource OS or Arcitecture that uses Lisp,
Scheme, or ScSh to create a Lisp Machine.
How hard would it be to turn a Linux box into a Scheme/Lisp machine.
If one were freely available, and more people started using
and liking it, it could cause a rebirth of the Lisp
Machine--just like Linux caused the rebirth of UNIX.
It sounds like you are just playing around with ideas, so here are
some toys:
1) Don't bother trying to make a new kernel. Use an existing one.
Otherwise, at _best_, you'll spend a decade fretting over device
drivers and the tcp/ip stack. Anyway, unix kernels are pretty good
-- even as lispm kernels. Unless your goal is OS research -- just
"take" rather than "make" that component.
2) Don't bother trying to make a "pure lisp" system. Otherwise,
at _best_, you'll spend half a decade fretting about replacing X11
and writing a web browser.
3) I think one lispm virtue that could stand to be reborn is the
extreme hackability, and compactness of code. E.g., suppose you're
machine is running a POP3 service and you want to add some weird
feature like, say, server-side autoclassification of incoming
messages into folders. You should be able to fire up an emacs
buffer and start tweaking the server code -- maybe even connecting
to a listener on the running server. The "seemlessness" of that
kind of hackability, compared to, say, grabbing the source RPM,
reading the config instructions, etc.... would be on of my goals if
I were going to work on what you're suggesting.
4) An interesting starting place -- especially appropriate if you're
interested in SCSH: work on replacing the boot scripts of your
system; then on replacing the inetd services. Can you get to a
state where the first invocation of the (traditional) shell is
after you log in? From my personal experience, if you're a pretty
good scheme/lisp hacker, you can get a bootable system (missing a
bunch of services, of course) in a couple of weeks.
5) Another interesting starting place might be to work on replacing
the shell for interactive use.
6) Another lispm virtue (from what little I saw, anyway) was
Emacs-based gui interaction. Read up on Plan9's gui, and on
emacs, and then edwin -- then do something clever.
7) Whence from there? You could dig in to making server functionality
really secure/fast -- you could build out towards making desktop
apps really slick -- lots of options.
-t
Peter Seibel
> Is there any OpenSource OS or Arcitecture that uses Lisp,
> Scheme, or ScSh to create a Lisp Machine.
>
> How hard would it be to turn a Linux box into a Scheme/Lisp machine.
>
>
> If one were freely available, and more people started using
> and liking it, it could cause a rebirth of the Lisp
> Machine--just like Linux caused the rebirth of UNIX.
>
>
> It sounds like you are just playing around with ideas, so here are
> some toys:
>
>
> 1) Don't bother trying to make a new kernel. Use an existing one.
> Otherwise, at _best_, you'll spend a decade fretting over device
> drivers and the tcp/ip stack. Anyway, unix kernels are pretty good
> -- even as lispm kernels. Unless your goal is OS research -- just
> "take" rather than "make" that component.
Along those lines, you might want to check out the Flux OsKit.
From <http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/>:
The OSKit is a framework and a set of 34 component libraries
oriented to operating systems, together with extensive
documentation. By providing in a modular way not only most of the
infrastructure "grunge" needed by an OS, but also many higher-level
components, the OSKit's goal is to lower the barrier to entry to OS
R&D and to lower its costs. The OSKit makes it vastly easier to
create a new OS, port an existing OS to the x86 (or in the future,
to other architectures supported by the OSkit), or enhance an OS to
support a wider range of devices, file system formats, executable
formats, or network services. The OSKit also works well for
constructing OS-related programs, such as boot loaders or OS-level
servers atop a microkernel.
For language researchers and enthusiasts, the OSKit lets them
concentrate on the real issues raised by using advanced languages
inside operating systems, such as Java, Lisp, Scheme, or ML---
instead of spending six months or years groveling inside ugly code
and hardware. With the recent addition of extensive multithreading
and sophisticated scheduling support, the OSKit also provides a
nmodular platform for embedded applications, as well as a novel
component-based approach to constructing entire operating systems.
-Peter
--
Peter Seibel pe...@javamonkey.com
The intellectual level needed for system design is in general
grossly underestimated. I am convinced more than ever that this
type of work is very difficult and that every effort to do it with
other than the best people is doomed to either failure or moderate
success at enormous expense. --Edsger Dijkstra
Alex Shinn
Tom> 1) Don't bother trying to make a new kernel. Use an existing
Tom> one. Otherwise, at _best_, you'll spend a decade fretting
Tom> over device drivers and the tcp/ip stack.
The TCP/IP stack is a one time, simple driver. The problem with other
device drivers is that they become outdated so quickly. I buy a new
digital camera and it doesn't have any support under Linux, the HW
manufacturers won't provide specs, and Linux+C is a terrible platform
for reverse engineering and experimental driver development. It would
be much better to have a nice Lisp/Scheme repl where you can
interactively query the HW and write newer drivers faster. It would be
worth the initial time investment.
Tom> 2) Don't bother trying to make a "pure lisp" system.
Tom> Otherwise, at _best_, you'll spend half a decade fretting
Tom> about replacing X11 and writing a web browser.
X11 is a monster, better not to replace. All functional web browsers
are likewise. GUI's are not difficult, and easy to improve on.
Tom> 4) An interesting starting place -- especially appropriate if
Tom> you're interested in SCSH: work on replacing the boot
Tom> scripts of your system; then on replacing the inetd
Tom> services. Can you get to a state where the first invocation
Tom> of the (traditional) shell is after you log in? From my
Tom> personal experience, if you're a pretty good scheme/lisp
Tom> hacker, you can get a bootable system (missing a bunch of
Tom> services, of course) in a couple of weeks.
Using a C-compiled Lisp/Scheme? If you want to up the ante a few more
years, drop C and write a native compiler. Are there any free Lisp
assemblers out there? I have a Scheme assembler if there's nothing
better, but it's x86-only right now and the ELF linker is primitive and
doesn't handle shared libraries.
--
Alex
Christopher Browne
> Is there any OpenSource OS or Arcitecture that
> uses Lisp, Scheme, or ScSh to create a Lisp Machine.
There's a sizable wasteland of fairly much failed projects; see the
URL below.
There are projects that try to create their own kernel; they tend to
run afoul of the problem of being tied to a /precise/ set of
hardware. They support one CPU, one SCSI card, one graphics card, and
as soon as the winds change, and 3dfx disappears from the market,
the software becomes a curiosity that hardly anyone could have run in
the first place.
The system that gets cited a lot is FluxOS, from U of Utah; they were
able to quickly embed a port of MzScheme atop the OS, which is
interesting. On the other hand, they never got around to letting it
communicate with either networks or persistent filesystems, which
makes it somewhat /less/ than a curiosity.
People in the Lisp world often hate X, and the way Linux and BSDs use
C for their native "APIs," but it would take a LOT of effort to put
enough effort in to equal the efforts going into maintain
compatibility of them with the latest and greatest hardware on
numerous architectures.
--
output = reverse("moc.enworbbc@" "enworbbc")
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/lisposes.html
"We use Linux for all our mission-critical applications. Having the
source code means that we are not held hostage by anyone's support
department." -- Russell Nelson, President of Crynwr Software
Burton Samograd
> Using a C-compiled Lisp/Scheme? If you want to up the ante a few more
> years, drop C and write a native compiler. Are there any free Lisp
> assemblers out there? I have a Scheme assembler if there's nothing
> better, but it's x86-only right now and the ELF linker is primitive and
> doesn't handle shared libraries.
I jsut started playing with the Chicken scheme-to-C compiler and it
looks very promising. It's pretty well documented and offers a good
stepping stone for people (like me) that are experienced C programmers
but can't figure out how to do everything in Lisp/Scheme yet. Combine
that with an online R5RS and scheming gets pretty fun and far less
frustrating (so far, but I haven't done that much substantial work
with it yet). It's quite well documented as well (ie. there's an
actual manual that's usable).
If anybody is interested in using it and is running Gentoo Linux, I
wrote an ebuild that you can use to install and test it out.
--
burton samograd
kru...@hotmail.com
http://kruhftwerk.dydns.org
Henrik Motakef
> Is there any OpenSource OS or Arcitecture that
> uses Lisp, Scheme, or ScSh to create a Lisp Machine.
No. There is/was a mailing list where people interested in a new Lisp
OS gathered, but AFAIK there were no big successes.
See <http://lists.tunes.org/mailman/listinfo/lispos>.
> How hard would it be to turn a Linux box into a Scheme/Lisp machine.
Depends on how you define "Scheme/Lisp machine" (and "Linux box", of
course). Lisp Machines tended to have specialized processors that your
"Linux box" is not likely to have, so you'd have to replace it. If
your Linux box is an Alpha, you can deinstall Linux und use
Genera. You can also use any computer running Linux to run Lisp on top
of it, just not as as OS.
> Are there any OS's that are written in Lisp/Scheme?
Not any that you can get at Sourceforge or your local computer store.
> Could Linux be ported from C into Lisp/Scheme, and would this
> constitute a Lispm.
Linux is nothing but a huge collection of C, C++ and Assembly code. If
you rewrote it in Lisp, it wouldn't be Linux any more. And probably
not a good LispOS either, just translating a C program will result in
poor Lisp style.
> Please help with a Lisp/Scheme based OS.
>
> If one were freely available, and more people started using and liking
> it, it could cause a rebirth of the Lisp Machine
Well, so what? Why do you think having a Lisp Machine is important? I
for one would be more happy if we had a set of really good development
tools and seamless integration with OSes that other people actually
use.
>--just like Linux caused the rebirth of UNIX.
But Unix wasn't dead. Linux probably caused at least as many problems
for the existing Unixes than it solved, maybe a lot more.
Building a Lisp OS that would be all like Genera today probaly would
not be a too bright idea, anyway - not only because you would not be
able to run lots of good existing software on it without good reason
(unless you would implement a POSIX layer, which is probably not fun),
I wouldn't want to connect a machine running a single-user OS focusing
on openness and easy tweakability to todays internet.
IMHO, Operating Systems have become boring in the last years. There
are several "good enough" OSes you can build upon. My advice for
someone trying to build a Lisp OS would be to start with the
user-visible parts, and let other people deal with boot loaders and
device drivers first.
(Not that I would try to stop anyone from building a Lisp OS, it
surely would be cool to have one. I just think there are other, more
interesting things to to.)
Regards
Henrik
Daniel Barlow
> device drivers is that they become outdated so quickly. I buy a new
> digital camera and it doesn't have any support under Linux, the HW
> manufacturers won't provide specs, and Linux+C is a terrible platform
> for reverse engineering and experimental driver development. It would
> be much better to have a nice Lisp/Scheme repl where you can
> interactively query the HW and write newer drivers faster. It would be
> worth the initial time investment.
Although this is a reasonable position as stated, I get the impression
that you think the advantage would be great enough to allow you to
punt all the _other_ drivers you do already have in
Linux/free-unix-of-your-choice. PCI bus and bridges, power
management, ACPI, IDE and SCSI, USB, i2c, exciting long blacklists and
ten years assorted workarounds for specific devices that don't
actually follow specs, networking (ethernet, 802.11, etc), video
cards. Not only do you have to write the drivers, you have to go
through all the same contortions as the free unix people have done to
get contacts at the company, sign NDAs, and the rest of that hassle.
Without the critical mass of something Linux-developer-base-sized, it
sounds like a lot of work. And as you observe, they become out of
date so quickly.
Not having done much of this kind of work, but my suspicion is that
if you want to interactively query the hardware, your first investment
should be in a logic analyser, not a repl.
-dan
--
http://www.cliki.net/ - Link farm for free CL-on-Unix resources
William Bland
> It would be much better to have a nice Lisp/Scheme repl where you
> can interactively query the HW and write newer drivers faster.
> It would be worth the initial time investment.
You might be interested in Schemix (aka SILK = Scheme In the Linux
Kernel). Have a look at:
http://www.abstractnonsense.com/software/schemix.html
for more information.
Best wishes,
Bill.
Joe Marshall
> IMHO, Operating Systems have become boring in the last years. There
> are several "good enough" OSes you can build upon.
What a horrible idea.
Wade Humeniuk
"Franz Kafka" <Symbolics_XL1201...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:b3b6b110.03033...@posting.google.com...
> Is there any OpenSource OS or Arcitecture that
> uses Lisp, Scheme, or ScSh to create a Lisp Machine.
>
> One possilbe Lispm is
> vlee.sourceforge.net
>
> and there was also talk about an Explorer II emulator.
>
> How hard would it be to turn a Linux box into a Scheme/Lisp machine.
>
> Are there any OS's that are written in Lisp/Scheme?
>
> Could Linux be ported from C into Lisp/Scheme, and would this
> constitute a Lispm.
>
> Please help with a Lisp/Scheme based OS.
There are already Lispm's around. Just take an IDE like
Lispworks or ACL. They have editors (much like emacs),
listeners (much like xterms), generic interfaces to
file systems, a compiler, a loader (compile, compile-file and load).
They run under xservers or Windows. You can write "shell scripts" to your
hearts content. If you really want to write a lisp device driver, you
can. You could start with with a IDe like these and gradually replace
the underlying OS, web applications, device drivers with code
written in Lisp. Just see Franz's site
as an example.
Wade
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> The only important thing is to not tie the Lispm to a specific chip,
> or Machine like Symbolics, LMI, Xerox, TI, and the Scheme Chip did
> but to make it able to run on all hardware--so that more people
> could try it out.
>
> Porting Linux into a Lisp/Scheme OS would be a great start.
slight drift regarding mit lisp machine & 801 circa 1979 ...
see last ref at
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#65 801 (was re: reviving Multics)
appears just before the next posting at:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#66 History of project maintenance tools ... what and when
--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm
Matthew Danish
> Using a C-compiled Lisp/Scheme? If you want to up the ante a few more
> years, drop C and write a native compiler.
http://www.cons.org/cmucl/
http://sbcl.sourceforge.net/
http://openmcl.clozure.com/
http://www.franz.com/
http://www.lispworks.com/
http://www.cormanlisp.com/
http://www.scieneer.com/
http://www.digitool.com/
Petter Gustad
> The only important thing is to not tie the Lispm to a specific chip,
> or Machine like Symbolics, LMI, Xerox, TI, and the Scheme Chip did but
> to make it able
> to run on all hardware--so that more people could try it out.
I think it would be cool to implement a Symbolics type CPU in a
FPGA...
Petter
--
________________________________________________________________________
Petter Gustad 8'h2B | ~8'h2B http://www.gustad.com/petter
Franz Kafka
> Well, so what? Why do you think having a Lisp Machine is important?
>
and I found it hard to get a replacement--plus it was getting slow by
current standards.
What I liked about it was:
1.) It never crashed on me. Windows gave me the Blue Screen of Death,
and Linux gave me coredumps--but my Lispm gave me a menu that allowed
me to interactively fix any errors and continue. I never lost
important data because the the OS locked up, or a page fault was
encountered because some lazy programmer at Microsoft forgot to check
the bounds of an array, or forgot to free some memory.
2.) Everything was written in Lisp, from the lowest device driver, to
the file systems, and network protocols--not that I understood
everything. But, I could look at a Lisp reference, or interactivally
test each function to find out how it worked.
3.) Everything was intergrated. The Word Processor/Text Editor,
E-Mailer, GUI-Toolkit, Web Browser. And, I could switch from one to
the other without worrying about wasting system resources, or having
too many apps opened at once. It was like the OS was a large Lisp
Interperter--that seemed to have unlimited virtual memory, and a great
garbage collector.
4.) you did not have to specify what datatypes a function expected.
Each operator knew what datatypes it operated on and how to handle
exceptions. This freed the programmer from having to worry about
making sure data types matched and from having to write fifteen
functions that did the same operation to different datatypes.
5.) The OS was Object Oriented. It was easy to extend a class to add
new functionality to the system.
6.) Each user was on the same OS as a different instance of the class
OS. This means that if one user screwed up the OS--it could be
restored to the default class OS. And also prevented one users
mistakes from affecting other users.
7.) A new instance of the OS could be loaded when the OS was running.
These instances called worlds could be loaded in real time--plus a
user could create a new version of the OS for his own use.
8.) Even the microcode could be written in Lisp.
9.) Security made sure that no code could be loaded from the net
without the sysadmins concent.
10.) The system could be configured to be bootable from the net. So,
sysadms could manage systems from far away.
>
> I wouldn't want to connect a machine running a single-user OS focusing
> on openness and easy tweakability to todays internet.
>
The new system would have to have a layer of security to prevent
people from the net from modifying the system. Linux is an open system
too. But, most users would want a system that's easy to modify. It
would make developing code on the system easier, and would also make
adding new features to the system easier.
As for a single user system--Lisp does not require a system to be
single user. With CLOS or Multithreading, or even Scheme-like
continuations it should be very easy to write a multi-user Lispm.
When network protocols such as TCP/IP, Sockets, Chaosnet, or Ethernet
are added to the Lispm security could be added as well to make sure
that only the sysadm could change the system. And by providing a
function in microcode--that could not be changed--to restore the
system to some default. This one concession should make a Lispm safe
on the Net.
It a GNU Lispm OS were developed--I'm sure people would use it. What
kept people from Lisp based OSes in the past was the high prices and
the speciallized hardware requirements.
But, If we write our own we could make it run on stock hardware
(Intel,AMD,Motorola) everything Linux runs on.
ALSO:
We could make Linux the FEP (Front End Processor) and have the
Lisp OS load on top of Linux.
Any OS could be the FEP. The FEP was used to debug a faulty Lisp OS
hardware error.
The Lispm would need an Editor, a GUI Builder, an E-Mailer, Lisp
Debugger, and other Lisp tools. Any OS could be the FEP even Windows
but I would shy away from Windows.
The only key difference between a Lisp Compiler and a Lisp OS is
support for a file system, a verious development tools.
I'm sure that someone could write Linux code to emulate one of the
older Lispm environments--kind of like OpenGenera...& this would be a
good start to creating a new Lispm.
Franz Kafka
> There are already Lispm's around. Just take an IDE like
> Lispworks or ACL. They have editors (much like emacs),
> listeners (much like xterms), generic interfaces to
> file systems, a compiler, a loader (compile, compile-file and load).
>
That's true.
But, most Lisp Systems cost way too much for a hobbyist or typical
computer user (> $1,000) or even (> $5,000) in most cases.
If companys would release GNU or freeware versions of there
products--I think that the market for the corporate versions would
increase. Because a freeware version would increase the number of base
users. Some would learn to code in LISP and develop new apps. This
would make more firms want to use Lisp with Java (which spread because
SUN released a free version) and C/C++ which is popular because a free
OS uses them.
Symbolics or MIT should release a version of OpenGenera that runs on
Linux.
Franz did a good job but should release a GNU Version of Allegro CL
Gold Hill should release a GNU Version of Gold Works 3
and other LISP companys should follow suit.
Clisp is good.
However, LISP is not as popular as it could be--not because it is very
hard to learn, but because there are no GNU Versions of Commerical
Grade products. I think that once a GNU version is out there--the
company that released it could make money on support, documentation,
and delivery; like RedHat does.
Another thing is to release cheaper versions of Lisp Compilers that
can create a Windows executable. Some programmers I know would love to
switch to LISP but cannot because they cannot justify why thay should
spend in the thousand dollar range--when they can get Visual Basic,
and Visual C++ for way under a thousand and sometimes way under a
hundred. (The managers told those programmers that they could buy a
Lisp compiler if it conformed to the ANSI standard, and came with some
GUI builder such as CLIM, or a VB type interface--they could not find
such a system.)
If a company released such a version it would make LISP more popular,
and if a old Lisp Machine company such as: TI, Symbolics, Xerox (which
did, Melady, I think), LMI, or even MIT released a freeware version of
their Lisp environment which ran either on Linux, or Windows, or
better yet both it would rekindle the need, and want for LISP based
OSes. (Users want OSes they can customize, and programmers would find
an open source OS easier to extend when new features are desired.)
The ultimate would be a Lisp OS that ran as a Java applet, or better
yet make a Lisp OS that is web based like Java so that people from
verious computers can log on to one central server. The server should
be protected so that only the client can make chages to itself--to
eliminate any security problems.
Alex Shinn
Daniel> Not having done much of this kind of work, but my suspicion
Daniel> is that if you want to interactively query the hardware,
Daniel> your first investment should be in a logic analyser, not a
Daniel> repl.
Not just interactively query the hardware, interactively write the
driver. So you could query the driver, write a driver function, test
it, and make changes and redefine the driver functions as needed. It
seems worth it to sacrifice support for older hardware if you could add
support for newer hardware more easily.
--
Alex
Kent M Pitman
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PFAQ/cross-posting.html ]
Symbolics_XL1201...@hotmail.com (Franz Kafka) writes:
> But, most Lisp Systems cost way too much for a hobbyist or typical
> computer user (> $1,000) or even (> $5,000) in most cases.
No, that's not true.
> If companys would release GNU or freeware versions of there
> products
Franz Allegro and Xanalys LispWorks both have free (as in beer) versions.
GNU CL, clisp, and CMU CL are, I believe, all available free.
Don't know the price of Corman Lisp, but last I saw it was WAY
less than $1000.
I'm not sure the current price of MCL for the Mac, but I believe it
is substantially less than $1000.
Even Xanalys LispWorks professional is less than $1000 for its
professional version.
I think the only two that are more than $1000 is Franz Allegro and
Symbolics Genera.
> I think that the market for the corporate versions would
> increase.
You have your wish. Why isn't the market increasing?
If there is a problem with the Lisp market, I am quite sure it is not
the absence of available, low-cost offerings.
> Because a freeware version would increase the number of base
> users.
Bzzzzt.
> Some would learn to code in LISP and develop new apps.
Bzzzzt.
> This would make more firms want to use Lisp with Java (which spread
> because SUN released a free version) and C/C++ which is popular
> because a free OS uses them.
Bzzzzt.
So far as I know, having free implementations has increased the number of
low-end users.
So far as I know, few if any of those users have gone on to use a
commercial Lisp, and therefore it's not even clear why Xanalys offers
a free version. I'd be surprised if the sales they lose to people who
are hanging on the edge are later made up by larger numbers of people
wanting a paid product.
I bet just the opposite. I bet people get used to getting stuff for free
and are even more annoyed at even the slightest charge for software
they can get for free.
> Symbolics or MIT should release a version of OpenGenera that runs on
> Linux.
Why? So that people can later not want to buy a for-fee version of
that, too? I don't see it.
> Franz did a good job but should release a GNU Version of Allegro CL
>
> Gold Hill should release a GNU Version of Gold Works 3
>
> and other LISP companys should follow suit.
Why?
> Clisp is good.
Then use it.
> However, LISP is not as popular as it could be--not because it is very
> hard to learn, but because there are no GNU Versions of Commerical
> Grade products.
I'm not sure what this means.
It might be a claim that when things are free, there's no budget for
doing the polish that a commercial version can offer. But giving away
more for free is not a recipe for commercial systems to stay in business.
It's a recipe for self-destructive socialism.
I've heard arguments that one day freeware versions will grow up to be
as good as commercial versions. I've even myself made claims that freeware
drives down the cost of commercial versions enough that there's too little
free cash to improve the commercial versions, which as a consequence might
make this claim easier to come true. But this is the first time I've heard
anyone have the gall to say that the problem is that freeware CAN'T make
something that competes with commercialware and that the solution is that
the commercial world should give away more free. I don't buy that for
so many reasons I can barely count them.
> I think that once a GNU version is out there--the
> company that released it could make money on support, documentation,
> and delivery; like RedHat does.
Then the makers of clisp are in a fine situation to prove this true.
> Another thing is to release cheaper versions of Lisp Compilers that
> can create a Windows executable.
Vendors are already HIGHLY motivated to drive the prices as low as
they can. Every vendor knows that if it lowers prices, it will get
more customers. The only question is how many. Every vendor thinks
seriously about lowering prices all the time. They are not idiots.
They keep their prices at the point they do not out of stupidity or
ill intent but because of the fact that they cannot AFFORD to lower
prices or they will not be able to pay salaries and they will go out
of business. They have bet their business on their pricing and they
know it. There is no more serious way they can tell you that they
know.
> Some programmers I know would love to switch to LISP but cannot
> because they cannot justify why thay should spend in the thousand
> dollar range
Then they have not investigated their options
> --when they can get Visual Basic, and Visual C++ for way
> under a thousand and sometimes way under a hundred.
The only language products you can get at that price are
(a) free software made by people not trying to make a profit on the price
(b) software made by monopoly-sized companies that can earn millions
on pennyware because of the volume they are dealing in.
If you're microsoft, and you sell a product for $600 to a million
customers, you make $600,000,000 dollars. Enough to pay a team of
developers with a tidy profit left over for a zillion people.
If you're a lisp company
and you make a product for $600 and sell it to 1000 customers, you
make $600,000 which will barely pay for the salary and overhead requried
to employ a CEO, a head of marketing, a sales person, a developer,
a receptionist, and, if you're lucky, a part-time combination lawyer
and part-time human resources person. Hitting a million customers
doesnt happen by accident. It requires marketing/advertising, and all
kinds of up-front expenditures that one doesn't just do--one has to build
up to. And one needs cash to do that. If one is not lucky enough to be
par tof a multi-million-dollar company like Microsoft, one does not
raise that cash by lowering the price of their product prematurely.
That doesn't create word of mouth buzz, it creates zero revenues.
And the word of mouth becomes "dn't buy that, it's about to go out of
business".
> (The managers
> told those programmers that they could buy a Lisp compiler if it
> conformed to the ANSI standard, and came with some GUI builder such
> as CLIM, or a VB type interface--they could not find such a system.)
This isn't the typical story. Most managers in the modern world don't
approve much other than C, C++, and Java or their variations.
> If a company released such a version it would make LISP more popular,
Based on what evidence?
> and if a old Lisp Machine company such as: TI, Symbolics, Xerox (which
> did, Melady, I think), LMI, or even MIT released a freeware version of
> their Lisp environment which ran either on Linux, or Windows,
That would take investment capital. It doesn't run there. There's no
staff to get it there.
> or
> better yet both it would rekindle the need,
Based on what evidence?
> and want for LISP based OSes.
Based on what evidence?
OpenGenera, by the way, cool as it is, is an emulated environment that
runs at best about 5x slower than the native host operating system on the
DEC Alpha that it runs on. [Last I heard, which might be old info. But
in any case, a small constant factor slower.] I don't see why an emulated
environment is going to convince anyone to take over. Java made similar
claims and in spite of being "obviously better" than semantically
bankrupt C++, it has not beaten out C++ because its virtual machine
is still way slower than native C++. And, to my surprise, it has not
even seemed to promote the creation of Java-hardware, something I was sure
was going to follow directly after Java took hold. [Maybe someone knows
something I've missed..]
> (Users want OSes they can customize, and programmers would find
> an open source OS easier to extend when new features are desired.)
That wasn't enough to make Lisp Machines take hold the last time around.
They used to be very much in demand in certain quarters, but the marketing
world is more complicated to navigate than this.
> The ultimate would be a Lisp OS that ran as a Java applet,
Emulated emulations. Mmmm. Cool for historical nostalgia. But I don't
think this would improve the marketplace for Lisp. Maybe it would make
sure that the memory of Lisp didn't die utterly as Lisp went down the
drain due to lack of dollars if all of this was free.
> or better yet make a Lisp OS that is web based like Java so that
> people from verious computers can log on to one central server.
I couldn't understand this.
> The server should
> be protected so that only the client can make chages to itself--to
> eliminate any security problems.
This is a complete change from any existing lisp-based operating system.
Gabe Garza
> Bzzzzt.
>
> So far as I know, having free implementations has increased the number of
> low-end users.
>
> So far as I know, few if any of those users have gone on to use a
> commercial Lisp, and therefore it's not even clear why Xanalys offers
> a free version. I'd be surprised if the sales they lose to people who
> are hanging on the edge are later made up by larger numbers of people
> wanting a paid product.
I think you're wrong, and I'll offer myself as a data point:
My first exposure to list outside the mandatory first-semester SICP
course was when I decided to use Lisp to write a ray-tracer for the
final project of my graphics class. I chose it because I thought Lisp
was a really stupid language to use for that kind of thing. However,
after a few weeks I had a ray tracer that supported multiple light
sources, primitive shaders (patterns, blurred reflections, etc.)
several basic shapes, and was efficient enough to render polymetric
surfaces with a "high enough" polygon count so that they looked cool.
Compared to the other tools I knew, I was able to accomplish a
phenomenal amount. It placed in the end-of-class competition and won
me a couple games from the judging EA representative. It was a very
nice introduction to Lisp. :)
I graduated, and have pushed for Lisp non-stop since, including at my
current position at MegaCorp. I used Lisp to implement a system the
other developers (Perl, ColdFusion, Delphi, VB, etc.) around me
couldn't even dream of, and it is currently deployed and used--and
will soon be deployed in a second organization within the company.
When I was a student, I used CMUCL. I could not have used a trial
commercial Lisp (I would have vastly exceeded the heap limits) nor
could I have afforded the full version of one. With MegaCorp, I've
purchased the Enterprise Edition of LispWorks, a support contract, and
once the paperwork reaches the end of a LONG trail I'll also have
bought (or had someone else buy so they could use the app) quite a few
Scieneer Common Lisp licenses. Outside of MegaCorp, I also bought a
MacIvory from Symbolics.
>
> I bet just the opposite. I bet people get used to getting stuff for
> free and are even more annoyed at even the slightest charge for
> software they can get for free.
>
I'm not. I'm not as anti-FS as you: I'd say I'm ambivalent about it.
I think it is hurting businesses. Except for a Windows XP[1]
partition that I boot on average once a week, all the software I use
regularly[2] is free. If the free stuff didn't exist, I'dve bought
it, and someone would've made money.
On the other hand, when I was a student I *couldn't* have bought this
stuff. I think the most (perhaps only?) legitimate place for free
software is for students (where a "student" is someone trying to learn
something, not necessarily someone eating top Ramen and sleeping
through that damn 8am signal analysis class). And Lisp *NEEDS*
students. It needs them very bad.
> > Symbolics or MIT should release a version of OpenGenera that runs on
> > Linux.
>
> Why? So that people can later not want to buy a for-fee version of
> that, too? I don't see it.
Well, I think Genera should be proclaimed an International Treasure
and released to the world. But until that happens I certainly agree
that no Lisp vendor should have to release GNU virusware. ;)
> And, to my surprise, it has not even seemed to promote the creation
> of Java-hardware, something I was sure was going to follow directly
> after Java took hold. [Maybe someone knows something I've missed..]
You've missed Sun. :) They have a perfectly good Java processor: the
Sparc. It doesn't run Java fast (nor does it run anything fast), but
if you're a hardware vendor, that just means your clients have to buy
more of your hardware, which is a Good Thing. It's still April 1st,
but I'm only half-joking.
Gabe Garza
[1] Which I actually bought, shrinkwrapped, from a store!
[2] Linux, XEmacs, Mozilla, XFree86, CMUCL, etc.
Henrik Motakef
> Symbolics or MIT should release a version of OpenGenera that runs on
> Linux. Franz [...] should release a GNU Version of Allegro CL [...]
> The ultimate would be a Lisp OS that ran as a Java applet,
Way to obvious. Try something more subtle next year.
Regards
Henrik
Kent M Pitman
> Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> writes:
>
> > Bzzzzt.
> >
> > So far as I know, having free implementations has increased the number of
> > low-end users.
> >
> > So far as I know, few if any of those users have gone on to use a
> > commercial Lisp, and therefore it's not even clear why Xanalys offers
> > a free version. I'd be surprised if the sales they lose to people who
> > are hanging on the edge are later made up by larger numbers of people
> > wanting a paid product.
>
> I think you're wrong, and I'll offer myself as a data point:
I didn't mean "few if any" to mean "none". I meant it just as I said
it. That is, "I won't be surprised if a small number of people
suppose themselves to be counterexamples, but I won't accept that as
evidence against my point". You're welcome to amass a list of all the
people who've taken the free version and find how many years people
have used the free version, then make a list of all the people who
have ultimately upgraded to the professional version later, and
finally to somehow demonstrate that the number of people getting a
professional version is longer than the number of people who would
have buckled and paid money earlier. Let me give you an example:
Suppose they gave out 500 free versions. Suppose of those, 15 people
would have had the money to buy the pro version earlier, but instead
those fifteen people used it for free for 3 years. Then to make your
claim, you need to show at least 15 and preferrably 45 names (assuming
that those few people would also pay for upgrades in that time, you're
welcome to assert that's a smaller number, so let's say 30 names) of
people who upgraded. I guess my point is that yes, a lot of people get
the free version, but that doesn't result in a sale. And yes, a few
people upgrade, but that doesn't make back the lost revenue of a prior
sale.
What I mean is that yes, the total number of users (paid+unpaid) might
be lower, but the total net size of the business (revenues from paid
side only) could still be higher with that lower (all paid) number of
users because of the lack of giveaway causing some people to ante up.
Not even to mention that this money would be received earlier in time,
perhaps at some time when it could be strategically used for a longer
term vision rather than later when it was perhaps too late.
The numbers like 500 and 15 and 30 are just made up by me. I really
don't know the numbers. But I suspect the number who get it greatly
outnumber the ones who later upgrade. And so on, to support the
conclusion my sample numbers purport to support.
You see, I'm nearly certain there are commercial environments that could
afford to pay for a Lisp but that know they can get away with a free one
or two or three. Maybe they say "eventually I'll pay" or "I'll just pay
for one but we'll use several". And each of those is lost revenue to
the company. How many result in product? Maybe none. So maybe the people
finally say "well, it wasn't a business use after all, I don't need to pay."
But geez, people buy software for business they don't use all the time.
I have a ton of macromedia and adobe products i bought "to see what they
would do" and never used that I paid good money for. I don't get to
send them back and say "sorry, i didn't use them for anything that made
money". So why should the Lisp industry bear that?
They do. And it's great they do. But let's give credit where credit
is due: The vendors took a BIG risk in guessing this would pay back, and
to date I don't think there is evidence that this was a risk that paid off.
I do think it's the burden of someone who wants to assert that vendors
should do more to show that there's hard evidence that vendors are not
doing enough already. I think the evidence BY FAR shows the vendors have
bent over backwards to do as much as they can. I think it's up to the
community at this point, if it wants to be that ungrateful, to show
otherwise, not vice versa.
> > I bet just the opposite. I bet people get used to getting stuff for
> > free and are even more annoyed at even the slightest charge for
> > software they can get for free.
>
> I'm not. I'm not as anti-FS as you: I'd say I'm ambivalent about it.
> I think it is hurting businesses. Except for a Windows XP[1]
> partition that I boot on average once a week, all the software I use
> regularly[2] is free. If the free stuff didn't exist, I'dve bought
> it, and someone would've made money.
>
> On the other hand, when I was a student I *couldn't* have bought this
> stuff. I think the most (perhaps only?) legitimate place for free
> software is for students (where a "student" is someone trying to learn
> something, not necessarily someone eating top Ramen and sleeping
> through that damn 8am signal analysis class). And Lisp *NEEDS*
> students. It needs them very bad.
Free as in beer? Sure. Student academic licenses, where they can be worked
out. Sure. But the LispWorks free-as-in-beer offering is much more
generous than that, and I'm betting does not pay them.
Further, I think a lot of students just end up learning that all
software should be free, just like they think everything should be
free. The harsh realities of life--that things cost--don't set in
until later. I think the trends show that mostly colleges are going
for free software, for two reasons--price and open source (which
amounts to "free books" since they are meaning to use it for
teaching). But those two things could be and should be accomplished
in other ways. Symbolics had open source under trade secret and could
have been taught.
> > > Symbolics or MIT should release a version of OpenGenera that runs on
> > > Linux.
> >
> > Why? So that people can later not want to buy a for-fee version of
> > that, too? I don't see it.
>
> Well, I think Genera should be proclaimed an International Treasure
> and released to the world. But until that happens I certainly agree
> that no Lisp vendor should have to release GNU virusware. ;)
When something is claimed by imminent domain, my understanding is that
the owners are to get paid for it commensurate with some reasonable
measure of the value.
But moreover, if it were released to the world under "public domain", I'd
have no objection because it could be reworked into proprietary software.
If it were released to the world under an anti-commercial poison pill
such as GPL, that would be bad because it would injure other players in the
market.
> > And, to my surprise, it has not even seemed to promote the creation
> > of Java-hardware, something I was sure was going to follow directly
> > after Java took hold. [Maybe someone knows something I've missed..]
>
> You've missed Sun. :) They have a perfectly good Java processor: the
> Sparc. It doesn't run Java fast (nor does it run anything fast), but
> if you're a hardware vendor, that just means your clients have to buy
> more of your hardware, which is a Good Thing. It's still April 1st,
> but I'm only half-joking.
Half-thanks. :) No, I meant there is no JAM that I know of.
(Java Actual Machine.)
Christopher C. Stacy
Anne> slight drift regarding mit lisp machine & 801 circa 1979 ...
That story is pretty garbled. The early people on the Lisp Machine
project were certainly aware of the 801 due to assorted connections
with people at Yorktown, but they did not consider creating the Lisp
Machine by using the IBM processor. (The Lisp Machine was invented
more than 3 years before the time you're citing, there, by the way.)
Christopher C. Stacy
Petter> Symbolics_XL1201...@hotmail.com (Franz Kafka) writes:
>> The only important thing is to not tie the Lispm to a specific chip,
>> or Machine like Symbolics, LMI, Xerox, TI, and the Scheme Chip did but
>> to make it able
>> to run on all hardware--so that more people could try it out.
Petter> I think it would be cool to implement a Symbolics type CPU in a
Petter> FPGA...
Isn't that called the "G-Machine" circa 1986?
Tim Bradshaw
> Another thing is to release cheaper versions of Lisp Compilers that
> can create a Windows executable. Some programmers I know would love to
> switch to LISP but cannot because they cannot justify why thay should
> spend in the thousand dollar range--when they can get Visual Basic,
> and Visual C++ for way under a thousand and sometimes way under a
> hundred. (The managers told those programmers that they could buy a
> Lisp compiler if it conformed to the ANSI standard, and came with some
> GUI builder such as CLIM, or a VB type interface--they could not find
> such a system.)
What is these people's time worth per hour? I suspect a license for a
commercial Lisp system, complete with GUI tools, would be under a week
of time, possibly under a day.
But hey, what's rationality when you can have some stupid mantra about
free software?
I used to really be in favour of free software, but the kind of
endless fundamentalist idiocy from the free software converts typified
by your post makes me just want to get rid of it all and buy something
which doesn't come with some kind of half-baked religion attached to
it.
--tim
Peter Herth
In the absence of statistics, perhaps we can collect some experiences of those
reading this list. So here is my very own experiences with Lisp offerings.
I have been toying around with Lisp for about 2 years now for simple interest
in the language as an alternative to those I knew at that time and am
more and more thrilled by its possibilities so I will probably continue
to lisp for the time coming. As a private person it was out of question
to spend hundreds of dollars to just try a language out, so at that time
the free as beer offerings either from the OSS world as well as the trial
versions of the commercial vendors *did* enable me to learn Lisp. Without
such offerings I would probably never entered the Lisp world.
With my current level of Lisp experience and especially looking at my
financial status I would be quite willing to spend $100 - $200 for a
commercial Lisp, but I fear there are currently no options there for me
(the only offer in that price range is Corman Lisp, but I do not use
Windows). So at least for me I can say: a lower priced Lisp could add
some customers. Please note, I am no saying that their prices are
too high per se or unreasonable by any means. I think the $ 900 for
Lispworks professional are quire nice in comparison to other commercial
software products of that size, I am only saying I cant spend $ 900
right now on Lispworks, though I would really like to, since the
trial version was very nice to use.
Currently I am mainly using CMUCL, I started preferring it to the
personal version of Lispworks since the heap restriction of the latter
is too strong to be usable for the things I am doing currently. Which
also means, the trial version doesnt really impede sales to people
wo want to do more than just testing. But here comes the catch:
if at any time in the future I get a chance to do a Lisp project
at work, I might even prefer CMUCL to other Lisps even if I could
easily afford the licence costs, because I have more experiences with
CMUCL. A very good example on how a Vendor can solve this problem
is in my eyes TrollTech with their QT library. It is available as
a commercial package as well as in a GPL-ed version for Linux.
I am not sure how well this method could be translated into other
kinds of products, but in this case GPL works greatly for them.
Students or other people who just want to write software to learn
or for fun can use the GPL version, paying just the price that they
can only create GPL-ed software based on QT. But this creates
a huge market share for QT, one has just to look on how many QT-based
programs are around. And this means there are a lot of programmers
around using QT. And when doing commercial work, all those programmers
are probably likely to choose that lib they know best...
Peter
--
Peter Herth
Dawn of the Ages
http://dawn.netcologne.de
Johannes Grødem
> Don't know the price of Corman Lisp, but last I saw it was WAY
> less than $1000.
And Scieneer, too, although it's a bit over $1000 if you want the four
processor-license.
> It might be a claim that when things are free, there's no budget for
> doing the polish that a commercial version can offer.
Yes, but you can also spin this the other way: Maybe it will actually
be done better because you don't have the pressure that you might
experience in a commercial setting. (Where you may have strict
deadlines, for example, whereas in (some) free software-projects,
people do work on it when they have time or when they feel like it.)
This is all just speculation, though. Also, there are differing
opinions on whether socialism is actually a bad thing. (I'm not sure
myself.)
(I also notice you used the word "polish", which doesn't exactly
connote "substantial functionality". This is the feeling I have
regarding some commercial products versus free software equivalents:
It's often just the polish that separates them. Better docs, prettier
user interfaces, etc.)
--
Johannes Grødem <OpenPGP: 5055654C>
Pascal Costanza
>>Some programmers I know would love to switch to LISP but cannot
>>because they cannot justify why thay should spend in the thousand
>>dollar range
>
>
> Then they have not investigated their options
I think that's an important point. $900 distributed over a period of,
say, 18 months is $50 per month. $540 over 24 months is $22.50 per
month. I don't think that's too much. Get yourself a loan. (Maybe
vendors should think about offering loans?!?)
Another take on the GPL: AFAIK the GPL hasn't been tested in court yet.
IANAL, but it's not clear to me that the GPL would stand up in court. I
am pretty sure that at least in Germany, it's forbidden to have
contracts without time limits.
(That's probably one of the reasons why someone might prefer open source
software over closed software - because open source software seems to
give you the guarantee that you can use it forever, without any time
limits. But I guess that's the same as with type systems: Static isn't
always strong, dynamic isn't always weak. And free isn't always open,
commercial isn't always closed. Or something like that... ;)
Pascal
--
Pascal Costanza University of Bonn
mailto:cost...@web.de Institute of Computer Science III
http://www.pascalcostanza.de Römerstr. 164, D-53117 Bonn (Germany)
Daniel Barlow
> With my current level of Lisp experience and especially looking at my
> financial status I would be quite willing to spend $100 - $200 for a
> commercial Lisp, but I fear there are currently no options there for me
Scieneer (which is based on CMUCL) goes for around $155 for a
single-cpu Linux version. See http://www.scieneer.com/s/
Tim Bradshaw
> Yes, but you can also spin this the other way: Maybe it will actually
> be done better because you don't have the pressure that you might
> experience in a commercial setting. (Where you may have strict
> deadlines, for example, whereas in (some) free software-projects,
> people do work on it when they have time or when they feel like it.)
Well, let's have something half as good as, say, CAPI, for a free
system then. It needs to run transparently on Windows, Unix and
(within a few months as far as I can tell) MacOS.
Or let's have Allegro's heavyweight cross-platform Unicode support.
Or let's, for that matter, have a across-platform implementation that
doesn't suck. At the moment we've got CMUCL which isn't
cross-platform, but mostly doesn't suck (modulo it doesn't have
threads in half its versions), and CLISP which is, and (last time I
checked, which I admit was some time ago) didn't support most of the
interesting bits of CLOS to the extent that I couldn't even start to
get code built on it.
> (I also notice you used the word "polish", which doesn't exactly
> connote "substantial functionality". This is the feeling I have
> regarding some commercial products versus free software equivalents:
> It's often just the polish that separates them. Better docs, prettier
> user interfaces, etc.)
These things *count*.
And this isn't just about Lisp, incidentally: despite the rhetoric in
which we are all drowning, a *lot* of free software systems -
including, dare I mention it, the sacred L*n*x[1], often suck really
pretty badly.
Yes, I am a heretic, You can burn me at the stake now.
--tim
Footnotes:
[1] Do we dare mention its name lest we are struck down?
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
cst...@dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:
> That story is pretty garbled. The early people on the Lisp Machine
> project were certainly aware of the 801 due to assorted connections
> with people at Yorktown, but they did not consider creating the Lisp
> Machine by using the IBM processor. (The Lisp Machine was invented
> more than 3 years before the time you're citing, there, by the way.)
that was just a copy of email to me ... sent on the date indicated; it
didn't actually give a date as to the request to Evans. i would have
expected the actual date of the request to Evans would have been at
least a couple years earlier given the 8100 reference. The first 801
presentation I attended was spring of '76 (... which would correspond
to your reference).
Nils Kassube
> side only) could still be higher with that lower (all paid) number of
> users because of the lack of giveaway causing some people to ante up.
You make the funny mistake of assuming that the removal of an offical
try-before-you-buy version also removes the free availability of
commercial software. If someone doesn't want to pay for a license, he
can get anything he wants for free (as in beer). Software piracy is
not exactly new. The folks who will be hurt by the abandonment
of legal free versions are those who respect the law.
I (and I suspect the majority of all software developers) will not
buy any software I've not seen and used before.
Joe Marshall
> Symbolics or MIT should release a version of OpenGenera that runs on
> Linux.
>
> Franz did a good job but should release a GNU Version of Allegro CL
>
> Gold Hill should release a GNU Version of Gold Works 3
>
> and other LISP companys should follow suit.
Someone should give me enough money to pay my mortgage so I can spend
my spare time writing a Lisp Machine emulator.
Tim Bradshaw
> I (and I suspect the majority of all software developers) will not
> buy any software I've not seen and used before.
Have you ever heard of the term `evaluation license'? I guess not.
--tim
Nils Goesche
> * Franz Kafka wrote:
> > Another thing is to release cheaper versions of Lisp
> > Compilers that can create a Windows executable. Some
> > programmers I know would love to switch to LISP but cannot
> > because they cannot justify why thay should spend in the
> > thousand dollar range
> What is these people's time worth per hour? I suspect a
> license for a commercial Lisp system, complete with GUI tools,
> would be under a week of time, possibly under a day.
Right. Heck, at work we once had to pay $10000 for a f*cking C
compiler, and I mean $10000 for /one/ user license. And just
imagine for a second what some people spend for /cars/!
> But hey, what's rationality when you can have some stupid
> mantra about free software?
>
> I used to really be in favour of free software, but the kind of
> endless fundamentalist idiocy from the free software converts
> typified by your post makes me just want to get rid of it all
> and buy something which doesn't come with some kind of
> half-baked religion attached to it.
Amen.
Regards,
--
Nils Gösche
Ask not for whom the <CONTROL-G> tolls.
PGP key ID #xD26EF2A0
Nils Kassube
> Have you ever heard of the term `evaluation license'? I guess not.
Sure I have. Like the program I have installed two months ago which
offered a 30-day evaluation. Unfortunately I only had the time to
use it once during the limit, now I won't be able to test it again.
LispWorks offers a "Personal Edition" with a heap limit, so we were
talking about an evaluation license and I presented the benefit
of having one.
I'd also like to point to the success of Cincom's VisualWorks
Smalltalk, which is available for free for non commercial use. Please
note that I do not want everything for free. I do pay for software
(although less than I used to due to getting burnt too much, this
never happend with Open Source). This is only a reference to a
successful business. I can build an extensive knowledge of VW
Smalltalk during my CS studies (with no time limit or size limit)
which enhances the probability that I will recommend its use in
commercial endeavors.
Franz Kafka
> > Symbolics or MIT should release a version of OpenGenera that runs on
> > Linux. Franz [...] should release a GNU Version of Allegro CL [...]
> > The ultimate would be a Lisp OS that ran as a Java applet,
>
> Way to obvious. Try something more subtle next year.
>
We need to be obvious because if people just hint at it. it might take
too long to get done. Genera is over 10 years old. Nobody uses it
anymore--not counting serious LISP hobbyists who use old Symbolics
hardware. (But, the Lispm companys either dropped Lisp or filed for
bankrupcy.)
A GNU version of a program like Genera will allow a new group of Lisp
hackers to see why Lisp is such a good language.
Since, freeware was invented by a person at MIT with EMACS and
X-WINDOWS, they could hopefully make a freeware version of a Lisp OS
like Genera--I'm assuming that MIT still has Lisp hackers who would
love to create a Lisp or Scheme based OS.
Look, they already build the LM-1 a Lisp Machine, and a CPU that
executes Scheme code. I'm sure that some Lisp/Scheme hackers over at
MIT, or in this newsgroup worked on such projects and would love to
help create a Lisp OS that runs as a Linux/Windows application.
The Lisp would need to handle filesystems, calling devices, I/O,
graphics, garbage collection in a standard way--but they could form a
layer that calls the Linux/Windows kernal, so that the highlevel
syntax would be machine independant and the low level details would be
handles by the OS that the Lisp environment is running in.
We already have several applications that would run in such an
environment: Maxima, CL-HTTP, CLIM, and EMACS. just some examples!!!!!
Franz Kafka
> I used to really be in favour of free software, but the kind of
> endless fundamentalist idiocy from the free software converts typified
> by your post makes me just want to get rid of it all and buy something
> which doesn't come with some kind of half-baked religion attached to
> it.
>
I an a student who wants to learn Lisp, and maybe make a few freeware
apps. in Lisp. I have bough a used Lispm for $500, and gotten two
years out of it. I am going to try to get it back on-line. But, I
would love a Lisp for Windows/Linux that could produce powerful apps.
I am not empolyed now, am going to school full time. It is hard to
learn Lisp when most of the Lisp compilers I've tried can't even run
all of the examples in CLTL2 let along ANSI. Is their a freeware
version of Lisp that can produce executables, and is fully ANSI
complient. I don't want to use it to create commercial
applications--just to learn Lisp a little better, and product some GNU
AI or AL apps. that I'd just post to the web.
How good is Clisp, CMUCL, does any come with an interface builder like
CLIM?
I am also thinking about a good Scheme compiler? Do you know of any?
Is there any good Lisps that are as cheap as VB, for a student that
is, and are able to produce Lisp apps. under Windows?
How good are Allegro CL, and Gold Works 3?
Thanks a mil
Florian Weimer
> Another take on the GPL: AFAIK the GPL hasn't been tested in court
> yet.
Maybe because the case would be hopeless (on part of the infringer, of
course)? 8-)
If the GPL is not a valid license, you have no right to copy or modify
a GPLed work, and you infringe the copyright of the author.
Tim Bradshaw
> Sure I have. Like the program I have installed two months ago which
> offered a 30-day evaluation. Unfortunately I only had the time to
> use it once during the limit, now I won't be able to test it again.
Presumably you're not up to using the phone or email to ask the people
for an extension?
> LispWorks offers a "Personal Edition" with a heap limit, so we were
> talking about an evaluation license and I presented the benefit
> of having one.
They will also, I'm sure, give you evaluation license on the full
product, as will the other vendors.
--tim
Henrik Motakef
> It is hard to learn Lisp when most of the Lisp compilers I've tried
> can't even run all of the examples in CLTL2 let along ANSI.
That's not my experience. I use CMUCL and SBCL most of the time, and
both seem to be quite close to the ANSI standard, and getting
closer. I'm sure the developers would be glad to hear about any
non-compliances, and treat them as bugs that have to be fixed.
> Is their a freeware version of Lisp that can produce executables,
The "building executables" question comes up frequently here, you
might want to check the google archives for details. Basically, the
answer is no, you can't build executables in the sense you can with C
with any free Lisp, but in most cases, it doesn't matter. You simply
have to ship two files instead of one, an executable and an image.
Recent SBCL versions include some trick to build nearly-executables,
IIRC, but I never bothered to look at it in detail yet. I just don't
see the existing delivery options as that big a problem.
> How good is Clisp, CMUCL, does any come with an interface builder
> like CLIM?
There is a project to build a free CLIM implementation, see
<http://mcclim.cliki.net>. It doesn't include a VB-like interface
builder however.
> Is there any good Lisps that are as cheap as VB, for a student that
> is, and are able to produce Lisp apps. under Windows?
There is Corman Lisp (http://www.cormanlisp.com), which can be used to
build Windows apps and DLLs. A student license is $125, parts of it
(including the compiler) are free at least for noncommercial use. I
don't know how good it is, but there is a free trial version.
Regards
Henrik
Andrew Reilly
> A GNU version of a program like Genera will allow a new group of Lisp
> hackers to see why Lisp is such a good language.
I clearly don't understand some subtle advantage of this Genera system. In
what sense is it /different/ from emacs? Is it just the dialect of lisp
involved that's at question?
> We already have several applications that would run in such an
> environment: Maxima, CL-HTTP, CLIM, and EMACS. just some examples!!!!!
Emacs has numeric and symbolic math packages, at least one web browser. I
don't know what CLIM is (a mailer? emacs has a couple of those), but
there are examples of just about everything else.
--
Andrew
Simon András
> On Thu, 03 Apr 2003 02:01:42 +1000, Franz Kafka wrote:
> > A GNU version of a program like Genera will allow a new group of Lisp
> > hackers to see why Lisp is such a good language.
>
> I clearly don't understand some subtle advantage of this Genera system. In
And one could hardly blame you, when you don't know what it is:
> what sense is it /different/ from emacs? Is it just the dialect of lisp
> involved that's at question?
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/genera/genera.html
>
> > We already have several applications that would run in such an
> > environment: Maxima, CL-HTTP, CLIM, and EMACS. just some examples!!!!!
>
> Emacs has numeric and symbolic math packages, at least one web browser. I
> don't know what CLIM is (a mailer? emacs has a couple of those), but
> there are examples of just about everything else.
CL-HTTP is not a browser, CLIM is not a mailer, and Google is your
friend.
Andras
>
> --
> Andrew
Daniel Barlow
> Recent SBCL versions include some trick to build nearly-executables,
(require :sb-executable)
(compile-file "test1")
(sb-executable:make-executable "hello" *)
generates a "nearly-executable" as you so aptly describe it, called
"hello". It's a fasl file with appropriate #! magic glommed on the
front, so still requires that you ship (or at least tell people how
to get) an sbcl runtime and core.
FAQ #1: SBCL doesn't currently run on Windows
FAQ #2: SBCL sort of has threads, FSVO "has". They only work on Linux
x86 (using the kernel clone() syscall), and were committed to the CVS
version about 6 hours ago, so it's not really what you'd call mature
technology yet.
Thomas F. Burdick
> How good is Clisp, CMUCL, does any come with an interface builder like
> CLIM?
CMUCL is probably all you need, on Linux. It's not a seamless
environment, but it's very high quality, and free. Use Hemlock, or
Emacs/ILISP as your IDE, and Garnet as your toolkit, and you'll get
yourself a nice development environment, and a GUI toolkit with a
Motif look-and-feel and all the tools you'd expect. You can dump your
applications as CMUCL cores, and deliver them with the runtime and a
shell script to launch.
> Is there any good Lisps that are as cheap as VB, for a student that
> is, and are able to produce Lisp apps. under Windows?
Check out Corman Lisp, the bargain-basement CL for Windows.
Alternatively, Lispworks Professional is only $540 with academic
discount.
> How good are Allegro CL, and Gold Works 3?
>
> Thanks a mil
Well, more like $1000, but that's okay.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
Franz Kafka
> I think it would be cool to implement a Symbolics type CPU in a
>
It would be even better if some one could create a VM that implemented
a Symbolics type CPU on an Pentium and/or Athlon chip.
Or even better if someone wrote a Symbolics emulator for Linux, Mac (a
software emulator--forget the MacIvory), or Windows.
We already have Mac emulators on PCs, PC emulators on Macs, and both
PC and Mac emulators on Linux boxes.
What we need is a GNU version of Genera that will run on home
computers. I as a student would love it.
Kenny Tilton
Kent M Pitman wrote:
> Suppose they gave out 500 free versions. Suppose of those, 15 people
> would have had the money....
whoa, that's micro, Lisp vendors are thinking macro when they offer free
versions: if you were a Lisp vendor with a nice IDE and GUI framework
(ACL's CG or LW's CAPI) and all sorts of add-on libraries of very high
quality, would you want people curious about CL to judge it by CormanCL
or CLisp or even CMUCL? Those are all fine products, but it's kinda
"some assembly required" (add Emacs, stir, add ILisp, knead 5 min...)
and "you want libraries? check out cliki". not good for newbies.
--
kenny tilton
clinisys, inc
http://www.tilton-technology.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------
"Cells let us walk, talk, think, make love and realize
the bath water is cold." -- Lorraine Lee Cudmore
Petter Gustad
> >
> > I think it would be cool to implement a Symbolics type CPU in a
> > FPGA...
> >
>
> It would be even better if some one could create a VM that implemented
> a Symbolics type CPU on an Pentium and/or Athlon chip.
I agree that this would be better in the sense that it would be
accessible to more people. Personally I think it would be more fun to
make the FPGA version :-)
> What we need is a GNU version of Genera that will run on home
> computers. I as a student would love it.
There is a port called OpenGenra (which is not open source) which runs
on Alpha. I think OpenGenra assumes a 64-bit architecture, but a
version for the Opteron would be nice...
Petter
--
________________________________________________________________________
Petter Gustad 8'h2B | ~8'h2B http://www.gustad.com/petter
Ketil Malde
> Andrew Reilly <and...@gurney.reilly.home> writes:
>> I clearly don't understand some subtle advantage of this Genera
>> system. In what sense is it /different/ from emacs? Is it just the
>> dialect of lisp involved that's at question?
> http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/genera/genera.html
Is there a version of this document that is updated a bit? I mean,
we know about garbage collection these days. Clicking on director names
to see what's inside is also not too new. How does it compare to a
modern Lisp system running on a modern OS?
More specific question: how is security achieved, when everything's
open, and communciation is done through unrestricted, shared objects?
The reasons given doesn't sound very convincing, looking from a
malicious user perspective.
-kzm
--
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants
Andrew Reilly
> Andrew Reilly <and...@gurney.reilly.home> writes:
>
>> On Thu, 03 Apr 2003 02:01:42 +1000, Franz Kafka wrote:
>> > A GNU version of a program like Genera will allow a new group of Lisp
>> > hackers to see why Lisp is such a good language.
>>
>> In
>> what sense is it /different/ from emacs? Is it just the dialect of
>> lisp involved that's at question?
>
>
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/genera/genera.html
So, it's different because it uses CL instead of elisp? It certainly
doesn't sound like anything particularly revolutionary, and emacs does
pretty much everything that that document describes. Just about every
smalltalk and forth system uses the same "everything's in the image" model
of operation too. Sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesn't. Emacs is
GPL and freely and readily available, which seemed to be what the original
poster was looking for.
>> Emacs has numeric and symbolic math packages, at least one web browser.
>> I don't know what CLIM is (a mailer? emacs has a couple of those), but
>> there are examples of just about everything else.
>
> CL-HTTP is not a browser, CLIM is not a mailer, and Google is your
> friend.
For those also too lazy to check google: CL-HTTP is an HTTP server, and
CLIM is an interface (GUI) builder.
--
Andrew
Kent M Pitman
> Kent M Pitman wrote:
> > Suppose they gave out 500 free versions. Suppose of those, 15 people
> > would have had the money....
>
> whoa, that's micro, Lisp vendors are thinking macro when they offer
> free versions: if you were a Lisp vendor with a nice IDE and GUI
> framework (ACL's CG or LW's CAPI) and all sorts of add-on libraries of
> very high quality, would you want people curious about CL to judge it
> by CormanCL or CLisp or even CMUCL? Those are all fine products, but
> it's kinda "some assembly required" (add Emacs, stir, add ILisp, knead
> 5 min...) and "you want libraries? check out cliki". not good for
> newbies.
Vendors can and will use whatever theory they want to decide what they do.
What I'm saying is that if you're standing on the outside claiming
they are doing the wrong thing, you need to show an absolute
improvement to the bottom line in order to make a rock-solid case.
Anything else is just hot air because it is not your own money you are
asking to be gambled.
I'm sure if they thought that (a) these things matter [and they might
indeed think that, but I'm just saying it's a debatable point] and
(b) they can afford to care [and this is the thing I'm saying is really
open to question, since they have payroll to meet and stockholders to
satisfy that they are breaking even], they'd be doing what you say. But
if they are not, then that means, by definition, that they either don't
agree with (a) or (b). [There are some other cases I consider unlikely
and am not discussing; I don't really mean (a) and (b) to be exclusive,
just the most likely ... for example, it is all-too-commonly suggseted
that they've never given any thought to this issue, and I'm not counting
that as a likely possibility.]
Tim Bradshaw
> So, it's different because it uses CL instead of elisp?
No. It's different because in Genera everything was an object, even
though much of it looked like text, while in Emacs everything is text,
even though some of it looks like objects. It really matters.
--tim
James A. Crippen
> Symbolics_XL1201...@hotmail.com (Franz Kafka) writes:
>
>> > I think it would be cool to implement a Symbolics type CPU in a
>> > FPGA...
>>
>> It would be even better if some one could create a VM that implemented
>> a Symbolics type CPU on an Pentium and/or Athlon chip.
People have been talking about this for a long time, but it turns out
it's both a lot of hard work as well as there being very little
documentation. Much of what has been done in this direction has been
realized by reverse-engineering from bootable images of the operating
system.
Also it's important to note that Lispms (specifically MIT, Symbolics,
LMI, and TI ones) were microcoded hardware. The actual CPU ran
microcode that ran macrocode instructions that Lisp was compiled to.
So the output of the Lisp compiler was just macrocode. There doesn't
seem to be much of a need to emulate the microcode hardware, but the
macrocode design makes a lot of assumptions based on the microcode
architecture. These make implementing the macrocode interpreter
fairly difficult, particularly because these design assumptions are
only implicitly mentioned in extant documentation.
> I agree that this would be better in the sense that it would be
> accessible to more people. Personally I think it would be more fun to
> make the FPGA version :-)
That honestly be a bad decision in this day and age. Computers are
plenty fast enough to emulate processors, and there's really no reason
to tie oneself to a very specific and nonstandard piece of hardware.
Once an emulated system was built it might be a good idea to implement
an FPGA-based implementation, but it would make sense for a complete
and verifiable emulator to be built first, since this would solve the
sparse documentation problem.
>> What we need is a GNU version of Genera that will run on home
>> computers. I as a student would love it.
Not gonna happen. Sorry. Genera is way too valuable IP for them (the
current owners of Symbolics) to release it under the GPL. If Genera
is ever released openly it'll probably require that all changes be
made available to Symbolics at no cost and with no restrictions. This
is similar to the agreement they had with MIT for the original Lispm
software.
Now, an enterprising youngster might manage to convince TI to release
the rights to the TI Explorer OS and software as open source,
considering that they've probably completely forgotten about the
existence of it. And that they apparently garbaged all their copies
and related documents back before they sold off their computing
division to HP.
> There is a port called OpenGenra (which is not open source) which runs
> on Alpha. I think OpenGenra assumes a 64-bit architecture, but a
> version for the Opteron would be nice...
OpenGenera is a product from Symbolics Technologies, Inc that emulates
an Ivory processor (the CPU of the later XL series of Symbolics
Lispms) on HP (Compaq, Digital, DEC, whatever) Alpha systems running
Tru64 Unix (Digital Unix, OSF/1, whatever). It's written in Alpha
assembly language. Any porting to non-Alpha platforms would require
massive amounts of effort, basically a total rewrite.
Why was it written in Alpha assembler, you ask? Well, because the C
compiler couldn't produce efficient enough code to handle the 48 bit
addressing required to emulate the Ivory word size and memory model.
So the designers figured that to make it fast enough to use in a
reasonable amount of time the best solution was to get Alpha assembler
gurus to write in assembler. Symbolics was going down the tubes at
the time and couldn't afford to wait for computers to get faster
before the product could see market sale.
BTW, the current cost for a copy of OpenGenera is $5k, not including
licensing or hardware cost for an Alpha and a copy of Tru64 Unix. The
latest cost I've seen for a Symbolics XL1200 is around $3k, but the
system is much slower (1 or 2 orders of magnitude slower) than
OpenGenera on the Alpha. But you don't get the nifty keyboard on the
Alpha, if that matters to you. But you do get the advantage of not
having a 150 (200?) pound monster with fans that can blow an angry cat
across a shag carpet.
As for TI Explorers, if you can find one in working order *with the
funny fiber optic console cable* then lucky you. Make sure you look
into the mailing list (look around, you'll find it) and offer to share
software and load bands with people if you want to make friends.
You'll need them.
If you have an LMI Lambda or MIT CADR then you should report to the
nearest computing history museum and donate it immediately. Don't
attempt to get it working yourself unless you've hacked on them before
and know what you're doing, or have the courage to lose big. Certain
people do however have such courage and are keeping things like CADRs
in their garages. Those people have more guts than I ever would.
(If you do want to run a CADR it's a good idea to invest in some other
Lispm as well. And maybe a DEC KS-10 running ITS and Chaosnet. The
latter can be had with an emulator and some hardware magic,
apparently.)
If you have some other weirdo Lispm (like a Xerox D-Machine, a Siemens
Interlisp box, or one of those weirdo Fujitsu thingies) then you
should pray to the deity of your choice for guidance and report to Al
Kossow immediately.
For fascinating Lispm info see:
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/symbolics.html
http://fare.tunes.org/LispM.html
http://www2.thecia.net/users/ptw/VLM.html
http://www.spies.com/~aek/xerox.html
(cheers)
'james
--
James A. Crippen <james at unlambda.com> Lambda Unlimited
61.2204N, -149.8964W Recursion 'R' Us
Anchorage, Alaska, USA, Earth Y = \f.(\x.f(xx))(\x.f(xx))
Armadillo
How does this system stop one process messing up another (either
deliberately or accidentally)? It does seem painfully insecure from
malicious programming.
Also, the structure described in the link looks much like a black-board
system - or have I got that horribly wrong?
JonM
Kent M Pitman
> How does this system stop one process messing up another (either
> deliberately or accidentally)?
It doesn't.
> It does seem painfully insecure from malicious programming.
Then don't do that. Get programs from people you trust.
The same problem exists today. People routinely download things from
public sites and run them with personal or root perms, even on
so-called secure systems. It all comes down to who you trust.
> Also, the structure described in the link looks much like a
> black-board system - or have I got that horribly wrong?
It has some of this quality in the sense that it's all one address space.
Although blackboard makes it sound to me like it _only_ has global space to
write data, and that's certainly not true.
James A. Crippen
> On Thu, 03 Apr 2003 09:19:36 +1000, Simon András wrote:
>
>> Andrew Reilly <and...@gurney.reilly.home> writes:
>>
>>> On Thu, 03 Apr 2003 02:01:42 +1000, Franz Kafka wrote:
>>> > A GNU version of a program like Genera will allow a new group of Lisp
>>> > hackers to see why Lisp is such a good language.
>>>
>>> In
>>> what sense is it /different/ from emacs? Is it just the dialect of
>>> lisp involved that's at question?
>>
>>
> http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/genera/genera.html
>
> So, it's different because it uses CL instead of elisp? It certainly
> doesn't sound like anything particularly revolutionary, and emacs does
> pretty much everything that that document describes. Just about every
> smalltalk and forth system uses the same "everything's in the image" model
> of operation too. Sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesn't.
No, no, no.
The entire *point* of a Lisp Machine is that it is written entirely in
Lisp. *ALL* *OF* *IT*. From the boot code all the way up to the
GUI. The SCSI driver, the filesystem, the network protocols, the
graphics devide driver, all the other low level crud, the user
interface, the process scheduler, the editor, the mail client,
*EVERYTHING* is all written in the exact same language. And not just
that, but all written along basically the same design techniques.
The beauty of this is that you can discover some random bug in some
high level application and *interactively* trace it all the way down
to the lowest levels of hardware interaction.
Here's an imaginary scenario. Suppose you're hacking on some random
high-level user app, a web browser perhaps. Your requests look like
they get to the server without a problem, and the responses seem to be
sent over the wire without error, but something goes wrong because
when the response makes it to the renderer all you get is random
garbage. So you figure the best way to find out what's going wrong is
to set a breakpoint near the beginning of the rendering process. You
test and hit the breakpoint. But the args given to the renderer are
garbage.
So you start poring over the call stack. Pop back a couple and you
find that there's something wrong with the data coming to you from
your protocol socket. Okay, so set a breakpoint right before your
socket call, then step through it. Step, step, step, oh look, this
call here gets some weird crud back from the guts of a low-level
protocol call. So you step into that function, looking for where the
data gets mangled. But it looks like the protocol handler never fouls
up, it's just getting erroneous data itself.
So you trace backwards a little further into the network device
driver, and see that some random function there seems to have a
problem because its args go in good but its return is all broken. You
right-click on the name of the function, select Edit Definition from
the menu, and zap to your editor where it has opened the relevant
source file and has the appropriate function at the top of the window.
Reading through it, you notice a stupid mistake where some moron LSHed
instead of RSHed. Fix, fix. Compile the function, load it, and try
again. You forgot that you set a lot of breakpoints so go back to the
debugger and unset them. Run, run, run, and everything looks good.
Save the newly changed source, compile the changed source file, and
pop to your mailer where you include the diff in a message complaining
to the network device driver maintainer that he's an idiot. Back to
hacking.
Wouldn't you like to be able to do that in a modern system? Even with
an open source Unix system like Linux or FreeBSD you don't get that
level of interactivity. Maybe if you really know what you're doing
you can convince the debugger to walk down the call stack as far as a
kernel syscall, but not any further. It's simply not possible for you
to even see, much less make changes to the running system at the
extreme lowest levels of the operating system.
You can't go frobbing the scheduler code, or some random device driver
without having to *at least* unload some modules and reload them
(during which period all the functionality provided by those modules
is unavailable), and at most recompile the entire kernel and reboot
the box. And *no way* do you have the ability to point and drool at a
function name in the debugger and pull up its source without even
caring what file it's in. Nor can you compile a single function and
load it without having to recompile the entire executable or object
file that the function was dumped to.
And this is just one admittedly trivial example. There's some amazing
stories about Lisp Machines, like the one of a support guy sending off
a patch that worked fine except at the complainer's site where it just
slowed down to molasses. Further inspection showed that the
complaining luser hadn't compiled the patch so the system was slowed
way down while it ran a hefty chunk of interpreted code at a hardware
interrupt level but never crashed the machine. It just ran really
slow, the interpreter making everything else wait while it wanked its
way through a bunch of hardware dinking.
Another story I liked was where one individual wanted a particular
file from a backup tape but the tape was written out in a format that
only allowed for bulk dumps, not incremental or selective ones. He
could have hacked up a utility to scan the tape and read out the
particular file he wanted, which would have entailed a lot of work as
well as a thorough understanding of the storage format. Instead a
much quicker solution was to start the bulk dump, drop into the
debugger with a magic incantation, step through the dump code until
the tape index was read, read through the index until he found the
particular file, then manipulate the arguments to the dumping function
so it skipped over all the tape blocks until it hit the location of
the desired file. At that point the dumper ran for a while and when
the file was extracted the guy again dropped into the debugger and
killed the dumping function and went back to normal operation. File
recovered, the rest of the contents of the tape untouched, and total
elapsed time was about five or ten minutes rather than the hours it
would have taken to write the appropriate utilities.
Anyhow, there's really no easy way to describe a Lisp Machine
environment. Pictures don't do them justice because they predate the
days of cheap high resolution color monitors, so everything is as
black-and-white as a Mac Plus. But unlike a Macintoy, a Lispm was not
made for "the rest of us". It was made for programmers, for power
users, for *hackers*. Every aspect of the system could be probed,
poked, and prodded without concerns of confusing ordinary users. Not
terribly user-friendly, but it wasn't intended to be used by 'mere
users'. Indeed, you basically *had* to know Lisp to even begin to use
the thing, since the shell was just a glorified Lisp interpreter. A
computer made for people who understood computers, not a computer made
for mass marketing and target audiences.
Even today there are a considerable number of Lispm users who do
nearly all of their development activities on Lisp machines,
regardless of what type of computer or operating system the end result
is supposed to run on. Even to the point of hacking up crude
emulations of the target system for quick testing turnaround. The
development environment of a Lisp machine is incomparable. There has
never been another environment that even began to approach the
capability, transparency, customizability, and programmability of the
Lisp machine. And the pathetic thing is to see how many 'modern'
systems are simply reinterpretations or rediscoveries of software and
designs that were pioneered with Lisp machines.
'james
(Oh, and by the way the Lispms didn't use CL natively. Due to
historical reasons the Symbolics Lispm used around six different Lisp
dialects, depending on how you define the term 'dialect'. CL
postdates the Lisp machines, which either ran a variant of MIT MACLisp
called 'Lisp Machine Lisp' or 'Zetalisp', or otherwise ran some flavor
of Interlisp. CL was an afterthought. Genera provided a couple
different types of CL as well, with different levels of compliance to
different standards.)
Tj
> Tim Bradshaw <t...@cley.com> writes:
> > Have you ever heard of the term `evaluation license'? I guess not.
>
> Sure I have. Like the program I have installed two months ago which
> offered a 30-day evaluation. Unfortunately I only had the time to
> use it once during the limit, now I won't be able to test it again.
Might I ask which CL this is? Corman does 30 days, then goes to annoy
screens if you don't reinstall. Franz does 60 days, then asks you to
download a new license file. (BTW, running their newlicense util is
broken under some conditions; just look at the orig email they sent
and redownload a license file.)
The problem is that crippling the free versions is the way to go, in
general. It might seem that it's bad for business, but empirically
with such products, I'm told it's actually best by far. For each user
who's honest, there are many more who'd say, "Thanks for the free
beer," and spend the cash at McDonald's.
You are correct that there's a natural antagonism between proprietary
software and its users. What is there to say? It's a muddled
situation, but there are free versions out there you can use. Pricing
is an interesting art, and many companies have gone out of business
because they tried to apply the most naive strategies.
Here's a recent entertaining article on pricing strategies.
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/68/pricing.html
Tj
Armadillo
Kent M Pitman wrote:
> Armadillo <mang...@eee-fs7.bham.ac.uk> writes:
>
>
>>How does this system stop one process messing up another (either
>>deliberately or accidentally)?
>
>
> It doesn't.
>
>
>>It does seem painfully insecure from malicious programming.
>
>
> Then don't do that. Get programs from people you trust.
>
> The same problem exists today. People routinely download things from
> public sites and run them with personal or root perms, even on
> so-called secure systems. It all comes down to who you trust.
>
>
Yes - I guess that goes without saying :) But it does strike me though,
if this sort of system is to become more widely used then it ought to
have some mechanism by which the "safety" of a program can be (at least
partially) guaranteed. Even if you trust someone and even if their code
is normally bug free, it is quite possible for something unexpected to
cause problems - most "general" users will not want to have to debug
somebody else's code. Even most academics & techie types will not want
to spend time sorting out somebody else's mistakes when they could be
working on their own...
Wade Humeniuk
"Armadillo" <mang...@eee-fs7.bham.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:3E8C4ACF...@eee-fs7.bham.ac.uk...
> >
>
> Yes - I guess that goes without saying :) But it does strike me though,
> if this sort of system is to become more widely used then it ought to
> have some mechanism by which the "safety" of a program can be (at least
> partially) guaranteed. Even if you trust someone and even if their code
> is normally bug free, it is quite possible for something unexpected to
> cause problems - most "general" users will not want to have to debug
> somebody else's code. Even most academics & techie types will not want
> to spend time sorting out somebody else's mistakes when they could be
> working on their own...
No, trust also extends to trusting that someone wrote good code that
is pretty well bug free. You have the same problem again when you
dowload and run any code. It could have bugs which could fataly
injure your system. An inordinate amount of wasted time and effort
goes into worrying about trust and catering to the general user. In
most systems like Linux if an unexpected bug happens you
are in an even worse scenario than with a LispM. You can just get
a core dump or the system freezes, (with no explantion). At least with
a LispM you get a debugger with a condition, a backtrace and a better
possibility of locating the problem. In both cases the general user
still needs to rely on the creator or some other expert of the
software to find and fix the problem.
It reminds me of the statement that "C is for consenting
adults". The same goes for the possible Lisp Machines.
Wade
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld
> Yes - I guess that goes without saying :) But it does strike me
> though, if this sort of system is to become more widely used then it
> ought to have some mechanism by which the "safety" of a program can
> be (at least partially) guaranteed. Even if you trust someone and
> even if their code is normally bug free, it is quite possible for
> something unexpected to cause problems - most "general" users will
> not want to have to debug somebody else's code. Even most academics
> & techie types will not want to spend time sorting out somebody
> else's mistakes when they could be working on their own...
But this also applies to Unix, and not to mention Windows. These
systems are supposed to guarantee that applications can't crash or in
other way cause harm to the system as a whole. Yet this does
happen. I've spent hours chasing bugs in Linux and *BSD when I should
have been solving my own problems. As for Windows, your mostly left
with the option of throwing your hands in the air and develop
(consciously or not) soft "rules" for what you can do and cannot and
how, trying your best not to get bitten by the same bug for the
twentieth time (the "wizard" potential here is limitless).
My point is, I guess, is that a "guarantee" is only as good as
practice shows it to be.
--
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld
Paolo Amoroso
(Franz Kafka) wrote:
> apps. in Lisp. I have bough a used Lispm for $500, and gotten two
[...]
> all of the examples in CLTL2 let along ANSI. Is their a freeware
> version of Lisp that can produce executables, and is fully ANSI
Just out of curiosity: how do you create an "executable" with your Lisp
Machine?
Paolo
--
Paolo Amoroso <amo...@mclink.it>
Paolo Amoroso
On 1 Apr 2003 13:33:18 -0800, Symbolics_XL1201...@hotmail.com
(Franz Kafka) wrote:
> It a GNU Lispm OS were developed--I'm sure people would use it. What
[...]
> But, If we write our own we could make it run on stock hardware
> (Intel,AMD,Motorola) everything Linux runs on.
[...]
> We could make Linux the FEP (Front End Processor) and have the
> Lisp OS load on top of Linux.
[...]
> I'm sure that someone could write Linux code to emulate one of the
> older Lispm environments--kind of like OpenGenera...& this would be a
> good start to creating a new Lispm.
It might be instructive for you to estimate the amount of resources
required for turning your "if we write...", "we could make..." and "someone
could write" into actual software.
In case you are interested in contributing, there are two projects for
creating Lisp Machine emulators, one for TI Explorers and the other for
Symbolics.
Paolo Amoroso
> I graduated, and have pushed for Lisp non-stop since, including at my
> current position at MegaCorp. I used Lisp to implement a system the
> other developers (Perl, ColdFusion, Delphi, VB, etc.) around me
> couldn't even dream of, and it is currently deployed and used--and
> will soon be deployed in a second organization within the company.
If this isn't confidential information, you might consider adding a note
to:
http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application
and/or:
http://alu.cliki.net/Success%20Stories
Paolo Amoroso
On 1 Apr 2003 18:27:55 -0800, Symbolics_XL1201...@hotmail.com
(Franz Kafka) wrote:
> However, LISP is not as popular as it could be--not because it is very
> hard to learn, but because there are no GNU Versions of Commerical
> Grade products. I think that once a GNU version is out there--the
Paul Graham used GNU[*] CLISP, which is GPLed, to write part of a
commercial grade system. Graham later sold his company for over 50M$. Does
that count?
> Another thing is to release cheaper versions of Lisp Compilers that
> can create a Windows executable. Some programmers I know would love to
You may check Corman Lisp.
Paolo
[*] I think it was not called "GNU" at the time, but it was GPLed
nonetheless.
--
Paolo Amoroso <amo...@mclink.it>
Paul Wallich
"Ketil Malde" <ket...@ii.uib.no> wrote:
> asi...@math.bme.hu (Simon András) writes:
>
> > Andrew Reilly <and...@gurney.reilly.home> writes:
>
> >> I clearly don't understand some subtle advantage of this Genera
> >> system. In what sense is it /different/ from emacs? Is it just the
> >> dialect of lisp involved that's at question?
>
> > http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/genera/gen
> > era.html
>
> Is there a version of this document that is updated a bit? I mean,
> we know about garbage collection these days. Clicking on director names
> to see what's inside is also not too new.
On the other hand, clicking on a function name to see and potentially
edit its definition, find the names of all the other functions that call
it, and inspect (and potentially edit) the stack frames of all currently
running invocatons of that function is kinda cool. Especially when it's
just a single mouse click to find the function/variable/whatever behind
any object or piece of text on the screen.
In my (very very very) limited experience the integration of language,
OS and IDE provides significant advantages over even most modern Lisp
IDEs on conventional OS's because you don't suddenly run into some
opaque block of code or binary data when you're following the path of
how something works (or doesn't).
paul
Kent M Pitman
> The entire *point* of a Lisp Machine is that it is written entirely in
> Lisp. *ALL* *OF* *IT*. From the boot code all the way up to the
> GUI.
A minor correction here (and also matter of personal opinion, of course):
It's important that it uses Lisp data, that it uses the Lisp stack
conventions, etc. Lisp Machines did have implementations of Fortran
and other languages (Pascal and Ada, I think)--not used much, but
could have been without it upsetting the plan, because those
implementations used Lisp (tagged) data rather than Lisp using
untagged machine data. But the point is that it all compiled down to
data that was executed by a Lisp-savvy microcode and/or hardware
(depending on processor). And even then, it's not so much that it was
Lisp but that it was (a) all uniform and (b) tagged-pointer-based.
This means uniform conventions for finding source code, uniform
conventions for interpreting and displaying data, etc.
Incidentally, on Symbolics systems, there were pre-loaded in the same
address space interpreters and/or compilers for about 5 syntactically
and sometimes semantically incompatible dialects of Lisp that were running
in the same address space. What _was_ compatible was the data formats,
so these dialects could cross-call.
I emphasize the multilingual issue because if you want to see a non-Lisp
example, you're better off going to MIT Multics, which was a pretty true PL/1
machine that again was pointer-based and again had cross-language stack
formats and a more uniform theory of data layout. The Lisp Machine was a
much better rendition of the idea done by some of the same people.
(Multics also had security, for those of you who think it can't be done.
LispMs just didn't WANT security at the machine/OS level, other than simple
data integrity as through tagged pointers. It wasn't that they couldn't
have had security inside this paradigm...)
And a few other remarks to extend some of your examples:
One important reason that pointer-based everything was important is
that often you could have multiple versions of things loaded. This
would be a nightmare in a text-based system because you wouldn't
remember which functions were which versions. In debugging Symbolics
Macsyma while porting it to Common Lisp, I used to load one copy of
Macsyma (written in Zetalisp), rename its packages, and then load
another copy (written in Common Lisp). Then I could run functions
that compared results of one version to results of another in the same
address space. (Macsyma was not designed for external calling, so
calling a separate program image as on a conventional processor wasn't
really an option.)
The line between system programming and user-programming was totally
blurred, which was double-edged. I once found a user who had crashed
their machine by redefining the Zetalisp TIME function, which was used
for the system clock. (They'd dont a DEFSTRUCT with no conc-name, and
one of the accessors clobbered the system function.) Being able to
redefine system stuff was useful in the right hands, but not always
perfect for novices. Then again, I was able to rescue the system by
opening the manual and reading what time did. It seemed to just
increment some integer every second. So I did APROPOS for other
functions that were time related and found SI:FIXNUM-MICROSECOND-TIME
and made a variable to store some arbitrary base time (using DEFVAR,
not system patching magic) and I made a function to add that base time
to 1000000 times the result of the other function (using DEFUN, not
some system patching magic). Then I told the debugger to proceed
using the new definition of TIME. The system came back up (although
the mode line said it was idle for several thousand years--itself a
remarkable thing, since the system was tolerant of the calendar time
having changed in ways I'm sure the designers didn't intend, probably
well exceeding some column number they'd expected to use). I told the
user to save his files and boot, with a better definition, though I
could just as well have said to grab the system source for TIME and
just c-sh-C (compile definition) that one function--I wasn't sure what
else they might have broken, and figured for them a reboot was good.
For more sophisticated users, we used to use the same address space to
develop and debug for often periods of 3-6 months without booting. This
is not just a server running in steady state mode--this is a developer
continually redefining and reloading and patching elements of the operating
system and producing production quality code in a continuously available
address space.
Franz Kafka
> As for TI Explorers, if you can find one in working order *with the
> funny fiber optic console cable* then lucky you. Make sure you look
> into the mailing list (look around, you'll find it) and offer to share
> software and load bands with people if you want to make friends.
> You'll need them.
>
Who would I contact at TI; nobody there seems to even remember the
Explorer--let alone know where I can find the source.
Would MIT be willing to share infomation about a LISP OS? They brought
us GNU EMACS? I know the MIT version would be older then the other
versions, but becasue they are a school they might release an GNU
freeware version.
Didn't Symbolics file Chapt. 11 and Symbolics Tec. flop--I've been
trying to find a used Lispm and after 1996--Symbolics.com went
down--it has never went up again, but I've seen mirror sites.
How old does the OS have to be before it falls into the public domain?
It someone wrote a microcode emulator--if they owned the machine they
could use a Logic Analyzer to probe it without having to understand
the design principals of the microcode. They could create an Ivory or
Explorer emulator which would load the Lisp OS.
I am concered about the technical aspects of this project--not the
legal or moral or ethical ones. I'd love to see a GNU Lisp OS build
within the next few years--it has already been ten years since they
were built, how much longer do we have to wait to rebuild them?????
What ever happened to Macsyma.com--I bought there product but their
site went down as soon as Symbolics.com did.
If Lispm companys are still in business, as people keep telling me,
why can't I find Lispms being sold anywhere on the net, not even on
EBay.
Kent M Pitman
Armadillo> How does this system stop one process messing up another (either
Armadillo> deliberately or accidentally)?
kmp> It doesn't.
Armadillo> It does seem painfully insecure from malicious programming.
kmp> Then don't do that. Get programs from people you trust.
kmp> The same problem exists today. People routinely download things from
kmp> public sites and run them with personal or root perms, even on
kmp> so-called secure systems. It all comes down to who you trust.
Armadillo> Yes - I guess that goes without saying :) But it does
Armadillo> strike me though, if this sort of system is to become more
Armadillo> widely used then it ought to have some mechanism by which
Armadillo> the "safety" of a program can be (at least partially)
Armadillo> guaranteed.
I don't want it more widely used. I just want to use it myself. A
private decision. I don't care what others use. I found it a
pleasure to work with a system that didn't bother me with bogus
security and just let me get work done. (And I didn't feel unsafe at
all. We were live on the net in the days that people were writing all
kinds of worms and stuff, and we were never bothered.)
Armadillo> Even if you trust someone and even if their
Armadillo> code is normally bug free, it is quite possible for
Armadillo> something unexpected to cause problems - most "general"
Armadillo> users will not want to have to debug somebody else's code.
(so much for open source... geez, I thought that was the nature of
the whole, misguided passion)
Armadillo> Even most academics & techie types will not want to spend
Armadillo> time sorting out somebody else's mistakes when they could
Armadillo> be working on their own...
(oh, is that what they want to do...)
Look, there is no real serious attempt at security at all that I can
see on Windows 95, 98, ME, etc. but it has not hurt market share
except probably for server machines, and probably exactly because
most machines in the world do outgoing-only connections that only
download data (hence the success of the conceptually-weird ADSL
connectivity product).
In Windows (non-NT/2000/XP), programs look to me to have apparent
write access to the whole file system. Yet I would trade my NT
workstation OS at this point in a minute for 98, which seems to be a
LOT more reliable, if I thought the set of programs I'd amassed would
survive the 'downgrade' and still run... [I get zero value from all
that security, I've found, and I get plenty more headache from NT
because I'll bet what makes 98 good is not the technically cool fact
of its "designed features" but the uninteresting fact that it is "used
more", probably meaning it's been fixed more.
It's true that in 98, any program can crash the machine (and routinely
they test this ability, just to make sure it's still implemented
properly). And their security comes from locking the room that the
computer sits in--which turns out to be (quite literally) "good enough
for government use". But none of this has been a barrier to
"widespread use".
Kent M Pitman
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PFAQ/cross-posting.html ]
Symbolics_XL1201...@hotmail.com (Franz Kafka) writes:
> Didn't Symbolics file Chapt. 11 and Symbolics Tec. flop--I've been
> trying to find a used Lispm and after 1996--Symbolics.com went
> down--it has never went up again, but I've seen mirror sites.
Symbolics filed Chap 11, yes, and later I believe Chap 7 (whatever
liquidation is). They sold their technology to Symbolics Technologies.
"flop" is not a term of art in the business community. Assets don't
go nowhere--they continue to be held by whowever still owns them.
Symbolics Technologies continues to exist and owns the IP.
Odd as it might seem, having a web site is not a requirement to have a
business. It probably _helps_. But it's their choice.
I wish it were more accessible, too, btw. But on the other hand, real
money was probably paid to acquire these things, and the owner is
probably right that there is unrealized value here. So I can sympathize
with not just open sourcing it.
And, finally, buzz in the back rooms is that the issues holding this
back are medical, not financial. So cut the owner some slack.
Serious medical conditions do not always schedule themselves well with
respect to commercial timelines. The world copes.
> How old does the OS have to be before it falls into the public domain?
I suspect that the legal copyrighting was probably all post-1978 (when
the copyright act of 1976 took effect). That
Don't know the citation notation, but USC Title 17, Chap 3, Sec 302(c) says:
(c) Anonymous Works, Pseudonymous Works, and Works Made for Hire. -
In the case of an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made
for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year
of its first publication, or a term of 120 years from the year of its
creation, whichever expires first. [...]
"I'm not a lawyer, but..."
As a technical matter, I don't think that it was ever published. I'd
guess ("and you might want to confirm through a lawyer if it mattered
to you enough to make commercial decisions abou it") that it is not
really relying for its public non-use on copyright at all; that is,
I'd guess that the copyright merely acts as a backup safety net assuring
that if the trade secret is every violated in the first 120 years, there
is additional recourse. (I don't know how trade secret law is enforced.)
The Symbolics sources have been offered only to paying customers under
trade secret, and anyone else who has it has a copy that was
unpublished and illegally obtained. I'm not sure what happens in that
case if you try to use it. Maybe nothing. Maybe after 120 years, no
one cares and case law will take a long time to establish.
Franz Kafka
>
> Personally I think it would be more fun to
> make the FPGA version :-)
>
A CPU specification language could be used to write a Symbolics type
CPU.
Then the CPU could be emulated by people who want to play with the
Lisp OS
and turned into a chip by people who want to hardware-hack a Lisp
machine.
If you could somehow create some mircocode for a Intel or AMD
processor to turn it into an Ivory-type (LISP) processor--that would
be cool.
Prehaps someone could write a good quality Lisp compiler in a ROM and
use it like BIOS to build a Lisp Machine out of stock chips.
How hard would it be to write a Lisp Compiler on a EPROM and create a
Lisp board or even a board for any other language.
If you wrote a BIOS in Lisp you'd be well on your way to creating a
Lisp machine.
And, after the kernal is written--the rapid prototyping and
interactive development that Lisp provides would make it easier to
create a Lisp OS.
I'm sure that people are working on such kernals--if anyone needs help
with such projects please e-mail me I'm a Lisp programmer who's
willing to help.
Christopher C. Stacy
Ketil> More specific question: how is security achieved, when everything's
Ketil> open, and communciation is done through unrestricted, shared objects?
Ketil> The reasons given doesn't sound very convincing, looking from a
Ketil> malicious user perspective.
It's a single-user system and there is no protecting the
user from himself, if he decides to be self-malicious.
be...@sonic.net
>
> >
> > As for TI Explorers, if you can find one in working order *with the
> > funny fiber optic console cable* then lucky you. Make sure you look
> > into the mailing list (look around, you'll find it) and offer to share
> > software and load bands with people if you want to make friends.
> > You'll need them.
> >
>
> Who would I contact at TI; nobody there seems to even remember the
> Explorer--let alone know where I can find the source.
It's actually a double quest: First, you must find a copy of
Explorer - Then you must convince TI to allow you to release
it opensource. You may need to "decompile" it in order
to get a source code, which will be nearly as incomprehensible
as the machine code but at least a starting point.
> Would MIT be willing to share infomation about a LISP OS? They brought
> us GNU EMACS? I know the MIT version would be older then the other
> versions, but becasue they are a school they might release an GNU
> freeware version.
MIT has lots of things they know about LispM's which they cannot
tell you or release because they have license agreements with
Symbolics (or with whomever now owns Symbolics' IP). And I'd
hesitate to assign too much responsibility for EMACS to MIT --
EMACS is mostly the result of the obsession of a single individual.
> Didn't Symbolics file Chapt. 11 and Symbolics Tec. flop--I've been
> trying to find a used Lispm and after 1996--Symbolics.com went
> down--it has never went up again, but I've seen mirror sites.
If so then someone else must now own their IP. It would be an
important first step to find out who.
> How old does the OS have to be before it falls into the public domain?
Patents last 20 years; corporate copyrights for American companies
are up to about a century now and getting longer every time Mickey
Mouse threatens to escape his continuing enslavement by Disney (who
ought to be ashamed of themselves for their baldfaced robbery of the
public domain, but that's another rant).
What that means is that 20 years after they produced it, (which
judging by the last publication dates of the manuals would be
around 2011, or judging from the first versions would be about
now) you can copy any ideas or techniques in a new work. But
you can't use their source code without permission in this
lifetime, unless Disney is first destroyed. And even if Disney
is destroyed, it probably won't be less than three-quarters of a
century.
> It someone wrote a microcode emulator--if they owned the machine they
> could use a Logic Analyzer to probe it without having to understand
> the design principals of the microcode. They could create an Ivory or
> Explorer emulator which would load the Lisp OS.
The problem with this is that the microcode isn't resident on the
chip across power cycles. The Ivory had a central CPU core that ran
"microinstructions" and a "microcode cache" that stored sequences of
microinstructions. The microcode cache had 64 (? I may misremember
here) addresses, each of which could hold up to 32 microinstructions.
On bootup, the microcode cache was loaded from persistent storage
(usually a disk). In the machine code for this chip, the address of
a block of microinstructions in the microcode cache was equivalent
to an instruction that ran that sequence of microinstructions. You
could also use microinstructions directly in the machine code.
So anyway, the point is that if you come across some old machine that
contains a Symbolics Ivory chip but you don't have their IP on the
disk drive and motherboard of that machine, and you power it up, the
microcode cache won't contain the same blocks of microcode that they
contained when that chip would power up and load the cache in a
Symbolics machine. If it fails to load anything from persistent
storage into the microcode cache, your logic analyzer would tell
you how the chip behaves when the microcode cache is zeroed - not
how it would behave with their IP loaded into the cache. And the
machine code, all of it, for the Genera system, assumed particular
loadings of the microcode cache and is incomprehensible or at least
multivalent in a very complex way in the lack of exact knowledge
of that loading.
> I am concered about the technical aspects of this project--not the
> legal or moral or ethical ones. I'd love to see a GNU Lisp OS build
> within the next few years--it has already been ten years since they
> were built, how much longer do we have to wait to rebuild them?????
About now, if you follow the earliest design of Genera. But I
think you'd need to invest at least ten years working obsessively
on it before you got something compelling enough to get critical
mass for opensource development anyway.
> What ever happened to Macsyma.com--I bought there product but their
> site went down as soon as Symbolics.com did.
Hooboy. Long story, many twists and turns, but it has a happy ending.
Macsyma was originally developed by MIT under an ARPA grant. In 1982
it was licensed to Symbolics Inc, which triggered a "no-freeze-out"
clause in the terms of the original grant under which it was developed,
and that resulted in DARPA getting its own fork of the Macsyma source
code. Genera was largely built to support this application, and
according to some the early ARPANET (precursor to the Internet) was
built mainly in order to provide access to it for researchers and
military contractors. Talk about a killer app!
In 1983 or thereabouts, Dr. William Schelter, a CS professor at the
University of Texas and longtime LispM enthusiast, made an offer to
DARPA to do the maintenance of their version of Macsyma under contract,
which they granted and which task he undertook. This fork of the
Macsyma source code is the original LISP code licensed to DARPA by
MIT under the terms of the ARPA grant under which it was developed;
the commercial version, sold by Symbolics and later Macsyma Inc, was
a separate fork.
In 1992, Symbolics Inc. licensed its version of Macsyma to a new
company, Macsyma, Inc. But that doesn't turn out to be important
in this story except that it made "Macsyma" into a company name which
couldn't be used for a different version after that.
In 1998, when Macsyma ceased to be available from commercial sources,
DARPA granted Dr. Schelter permission to redistribute their version
of it royalty-free, but under a different name so as not to confuse
it with the erstwhile commercial product and now-registered company
name. He proceeded to do so for three years. The alternate name he
chose is "Maxima." People ignored it in droves because by then the
commercial version had substantial extensions such as PD which Maxima
lacked. Then, in 2001, Dr. Schelter died of a heart attack.
There was some confusion about the changeover, but eventually a
sourceforge project took over its maintenance and distribution, and
a GPL'd version of it can be found today at
http://maxima.sourceforge.net .
> If Lispm companys are still in business, as people keep telling me,
> why can't I find Lispms being sold anywhere on the net, not even on
> EBay.
Two LispMs have been sold on ebay in the last year. If you want one,
you just need to have patience and be persistent. Oh, and be ready to
bid high; collectors are paying museum-piece prices for these, which is
at this point a couple orders of magnitude higher than the cost of
equivalent processing power in other hardware.
Bear
(used to hack LispMs in college)
Martti Halminen
> Lisp Machines did have implementations of Fortran
> and other languages (Pascal and Ada, I think)
Also C (pre-ANSI).
--
Barry Margolin
It was dpANS C.
--
Barry Margolin, barry.m...@level3.com
Genuity Managed Services, a Level(3) Company, Woburn, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.
Henrik Motakef
>> Lisp Machines did have implementations of Fortran
>> and other languages (Pascal and Ada, I think)
> Also C (pre-ANSI).
BTW, I seem to remember that there were two versions of a C compiler
for Genera; the newer one directly compiled to microcode, while the
older compiled to Lisp. If this is not completly wrong (which it may
well be), I hereby promise most-positive-fixnum coolness points for
the first one to use the older approach to implement an FFI-ersatz for
a modern CL. :)
Regards
Henrik
Henrik Motakef
> [...] a GNU Lispm OS [...]
BTW: Even if I guess that you mean "licensed under the terms of the
GNU GPL" when you say "GNU", the original GNU announcementน mentioned
that "Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming
languages" in the GNU system.
I guess that full set of Lisp system libraries and development tools
will be released shortly after the HURD goes gold. ;-)
Regards
Henrik
Marco Antoniotti
Other people have already pointed this out, but....
Franz Kafka wrote:
> Petter Gustad wrote:
>
> >Personally I think it would be more fun to
> >make the FPGA version :-)
> >
>
>
> A CPU specification language could be used to write a Symbolics type
> CPU.
Once you have chosen your Hardware Design Language (VHDL, Verilog or one
you have implemented from scratch in CL) you can start writing the
"Symbolics type CPU".
Can you estimate the cost for this enterprise?
>
> Then the CPU could be emulated by people who want to play with the
> Lisp OS
This assumes you have the OS. Can you estimate the cost of this enterprise?
>
> and turned into a chip by people who want to hardware-hack a Lisp
> machine.
Again, can you estimate the cost of this enterprise, given the cost of
producing hardware?
>
>
> If you could somehow create some mircocode for a Intel or AMD
> processor to turn it into an Ivory-type (LISP) processor--that would
> be cool.
Yes. And this is usually beyond the time-frame of a Ph.D. thesis.
>
> Prehaps someone could write a good quality Lisp compiler in a ROM and
> use it like BIOS to build a Lisp Machine out of stock chips.
Once you have done all of the above, yes.
>
>
> How hard would it be to write a Lisp Compiler on a EPROM and create a
> Lisp board or even a board for any other language.
It isn't hard. It's costly.
>
> If you wrote a BIOS in Lisp you'd be well on your way to creating a
> Lisp machine.
>
> And, after the kernal is written--the rapid prototyping and
> interactive development that Lisp provides would make it easier to
> create a Lisp OS.
>
> I'm sure that people are working on such kernals--if anyone needs help
> with such projects please e-mail me I'm a Lisp programmer who's
> willing to help.
How about helping on many other less risky, less costly, more directly
useful projects out there first? McCLIM for example.
Cheers
--
Marco Antoniotti
James A. Crippen
> On 2 Apr 2003 08:19:01 -0800, Symbolics_XL1201...@hotmail.com
> (Franz Kafka) wrote:
>
>> apps. in Lisp. I have bough a used Lispm for $500, and gotten two
> [...]
>> all of the examples in CLTL2 let along ANSI. Is their a freeware
>> version of Lisp that can produce executables, and is fully ANSI
>
> Just out of curiosity: how do you create an "executable" with your Lisp
> Machine?
There's not really such a thing. You just load code into the system
and then call some random startup function provided.
There are object files created by the compiler. Depending on the
system they are usually known by the same sorts of suffices that show
up on non-Lispms, eg FASL, LOAD, etc. These aren't executables
though, in the sense that they are run as subprocesses of the shell.
'james
James A. Crippen
> In article <3E8C888B...@kolumbus.fi>,
> Martti Halminen <martti....@kolumbus.fi> wrote:
>>Kent M Pitman wrote:
>>
>>> Lisp Machines did have implementations of Fortran
>>> and other languages (Pascal and Ada, I think)
>>
>>Also C (pre-ANSI).
>
> It was dpANS C.
And it worked well enough to compile X11R5, which is a pretty decent
test of compiler verification.
Genera has an X server and an X client service. The server absolutely
loses, although it theoretically works. The client service (running X
clients outputting to some other machine) works pretty well, even
supporting 8bpp color.
The X servers were necessary for a VME bus card version of the
XL400/XL1200 that plugged into a Sun 3 system. Its terminal was the
Sun's X server. Later products included a standalone XL1201 box that
could be used in a similar manner without needing a head.
'james
James A. Crippen
> Franz Kafka wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > As for TI Explorers, if you can find one in working order *with the
>> > funny fiber optic console cable* then lucky you. Make sure you look
>> > into the mailing list (look around, you'll find it) and offer to share
>> > software and load bands with people if you want to make friends.
>> > You'll need them.
>> >
>>
>> Who would I contact at TI; nobody there seems to even remember the
>> Explorer--let alone know where I can find the source.
TI doesn't have anything on Explorers anymore. People who work there
have personally told me so. They trashed it all months before they
sold their entire computing equipment division to HP.
The only Explorer related things that TI still has are the IP rights,
such as patents and copyrights. Getting that out of the hands of
their lawyers could be entertaining.
TI basically would like the Explorer to be completely forgotten.
They've already forgotten about it.
> It's actually a double quest: First, you must find a copy of
> Explorer - Then you must convince TI to allow you to release
> it opensource. You may need to "decompile" it in order
> to get a source code, which will be nearly as incomprehensible
> as the machine code but at least a starting point.
Like all LispMs, the Explorer came with the OS source. The
*microcode* sources were almost never included, except for clients
with certain special needs. The documentation for the macrocode
engine is pretty sparse but it's almost what you need to know to
construct an emulator. The hardware interface part is hard though,
and undocumented. It has to be worked out by looking at the
disassembled macrocode and paying attention to memory usage. (The
Explorer has *two* memory maps, one for the macrocode Lisp system and
the 'real' one that the microcode and NuBus backplane know about.)
>> Would MIT be willing to share infomation about a LISP OS? They brought
>> us GNU EMACS? I know the MIT version would be older then the other
>> versions, but becasue they are a school they might release an GNU
>> freeware version.
>
> MIT has lots of things they know about LispM's which they cannot
> tell you or release because they have license agreements with
> Symbolics (or with whomever now owns Symbolics' IP). And I'd
> hesitate to assign too much responsibility for EMACS to MIT --
> EMACS is mostly the result of the obsession of a single individual.
It might be possible to find someone with the sources from the CADR,
which would be basically owned by MIT and not by Symbolics. You'd
have to look at each source file to see if it was copyrighted by one,
the other, or both. Same goes for LMI copyright, which would be owned
by TI.
>> How old does the OS have to be before it falls into the public domain?
>
> Patents last 20 years; corporate copyrights for American companies
> are up to about a century now and getting longer every time Mickey
> Mouse threatens to escape his continuing enslavement by Disney (who
> ought to be ashamed of themselves for their baldfaced robbery of the
> public domain, but that's another rant).
>
> What that means is that 20 years after they produced it, (which
> judging by the last publication dates of the manuals would be
> around 2011, or judging from the first versions would be about
> now) you can copy any ideas or techniques in a new work. But
> you can't use their source code without permission in this
> lifetime, unless Disney is first destroyed. And even if Disney
> is destroyed, it probably won't be less than three-quarters of a
> century.
The patent issued for Symbolics for the 3600 was in 1985. So count
from then. That patent is available online if you search for it.
It's huge though, including the entire octal dump of microcode.
TI issued patents all over the place, from the day they first met LMI
all the way to the very end of the Explorer line. Theirs are much
less comprehensive and scattered, and are of little use except for
occasional reference for certain hardware specs not otherwise
documented.
> The problem with this is that the microcode isn't resident on the
> chip across power cycles. The Ivory had a central CPU core that ran
> "microinstructions" and a "microcode cache" that stored sequences of
> microinstructions. The microcode cache had 64 (? I may misremember
> here) addresses, each of which could hold up to 32 microinstructions.
> On bootup, the microcode cache was loaded from persistent storage
> (usually a disk). In the machine code for this chip, the address of
> a block of microinstructions in the microcode cache was equivalent
> to an instruction that ran that sequence of microinstructions. You
> could also use microinstructions directly in the machine code.
Direct references to microinstructions used the DTP-U-ENTRY, at least
on the Exploder. That's what makes emulating it hard, because you
have to emulate ucode entries just like other macrocode. And the
ucode stuff usually did the hardware interface stuff, like I/O.
> So anyway, the point is that if you come across some old machine that
> contains a Symbolics Ivory chip but you don't have their IP on the
> disk drive and motherboard of that machine, and you power it up, the
> microcode cache won't contain the same blocks of microcode that they
> contained when that chip would power up and load the cache in a
> Symbolics machine.
The microcode load was supplied off of the Breath Of Life tape (or
CD). Without that all you got was the FEP.
>> I am concered about the technical aspects of this project--not the
>> legal or moral or ethical ones. I'd love to see a GNU Lisp OS build
>> within the next few years--it has already been ten years since they
>> were built, how much longer do we have to wait to rebuild them?????
>
> About now, if you follow the earliest design of Genera. But I
> think you'd need to invest at least ten years working obsessively
> on it before you got something compelling enough to get critical
> mass for opensource development anyway.
It looks to be taking that kind of obsession, yes. Which is rare,
yes. Which is why we're not seeing anything yet.
>> If Lispm companys are still in business, as people keep telling me,
>> why can't I find Lispms being sold anywhere on the net, not even on
>> EBay.
>
> Two LispMs have been sold on ebay in the last year. If you want one,
> you just need to have patience and be persistent. Oh, and be ready to
> bid high; collectors are paying museum-piece prices for these, which is
> at this point a couple orders of magnitude higher than the cost of
> equivalent processing power in other hardware.
As I posted elsewhere you can usually get a used working XL1200 for
around $3600 bucks. Shipping is outrageous. It uses SCSI so you
don't have much problem with disks (except that only disks which can
be formatted at 1280 bytes per block will work). And it uses ethernet
so connectivity isn't a problem either. The console is irreplaceable,
as it's entirely hardware specific. The console cable (which carries
monitor output and key/mouse input as well as serial) is also
irreplaceable unless you're really good at making cables.
The Explorer is not commercially available anywhere, but can be had
occasionally from warehouse or machine room cleanouts. It has a fiber
optic cable for its console which uses some weird connector unknown to
mankind. Replacing it is very hard. Other than that it's much like
the Symbolics boxen, but instead of VME bus it uses NuBus (the
predecessor to that used in Macintoys).
LMI Lambdas and MIT CADRs are essentially unavailable unless the
Goddess smiles upon you. And even then it's hard to keep one around
because they're so big and crufty. You basically have to be a wizard
to maintain one.
Xerox D-Machines are marginally more available and have various
limitations of their own, particularly el-cheapo displays that let out
magic smoke frequently.
James A. Crippen
>> How old does the OS have to be before it falls into the public domain?
>
> I suspect that the legal copyrighting was probably all post-1978 (when
> the copyright act of 1976 took effect). That
Here's a line from COMPILER;COMPILE.LISP:
;;; Copyright (C) 1980, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is from the Explorer sources, but nonetheless would have been the
same for Symbolics's copy as well.
Symbolics and LMI both got their sources from MIT. It appears that
all the sources were branded with MIT's copyright before they were
shared out to the two spinoffs subsequent to the Great Schism.
LMI later was swallowed by TI. If that helps make things clear.
Barry Margolin
James A. Crippen <ja...@unlambda.com> wrote:
>Barry Margolin <barry.m...@level3.com> writes:
>
>> In article <3E8C888B...@kolumbus.fi>,
>> Martti Halminen <martti....@kolumbus.fi> wrote:
>>>Kent M Pitman wrote:
>>>
>>>> Lisp Machines did have implementations of Fortran
>>>> and other languages (Pascal and Ada, I think)
>>>
>>>Also C (pre-ANSI).
>>
>> It was dpANS C.
>
>And it worked well enough to compile X11R5, which is a pretty decent
>test of compiler verification.
IIRC, it worked *too* well to compile X11R4. It had lots of stuff that was
not valid in ANSI C. For instance, many functions for color displays took
an extra argument that the corresponding b&w functions didn't have; these
functions would be called generically through a dispatch vector, and the
caller would pass the extra argument. Traditional Unix compilers would
just ignore extra arguments, but the Lispm would signal a "wrong number of
arguments" error. We had to find all those functions and add an extra
"ignore" argument to them (which then resulted in lots of "unused variable"
warnings at compile time -- C doesn't have anything like (declare (ignore
...))).
>Genera has an X server and an X client service. The server absolutely
>loses, although it theoretically works. The client service (running X
>clients outputting to some other machine) works pretty well, even
>supporting 8bpp color.
I remember using both, and I agree with your assessment. For the last year
or so that I was using Lispms, I was also working Suns heavily, so I
replaced the Lispm display on my desktop with an X terminal, and displayed
my Lispm desktop on it. It worked very well -- the only time I needed to
use the real console was to access the FEP (we had 36xx Lispms, not Ivory).
Barry Margolin
I don't think so. TI licensed LMI's technology to create the Explorer, but
I don't think they ever acquired the company itself. IIRC, LMI was
acquired by Gigamos, and then they either stopped marketing the LMI
products or went out of business as well.
Barry Margolin
>from then. That patent is available online if you search for it.
>It's huge though, including the entire octal dump of microcode.
If you were going to emulate something, Ivory would probably be a better
choice than 3600. In fact, isn't OpenGenera basically Genera running on an
Ivory emulator for the Alpha?
Barry Margolin
I don't think there was one that compiled to microcode -- I think you mean
it compiled directly to machine code, just like the Lisp compiler. That
was the one that Symbolics wrote.
The other compiler was ZETA-C, written by a non-Symbolics person, whose
name I don't remember.
Gorbag
Crippen" <ja...@unlambda.com> wrote:
> Barry Margolin <barry.m...@level3.com> writes:
>
>> In article <3E8C888B...@kolumbus.fi>,
>> Martti Halminen <martti....@kolumbus.fi> wrote:
>>> Kent M Pitman wrote:
>>>
>>>> Lisp Machines did have implementations of Fortran
>>>> and other languages (Pascal and Ada, I think)
>>>
>>> Also C (pre-ANSI).
>>
>> It was dpANS C.
>
> And it worked well enough to compile X11R5, which is a pretty decent
> test of compiler verification.
>
> Genera has an X server and an X client service. The server absolutely
> loses, although it theoretically works. The client service (running X
> clients outputting to some other machine) works pretty well, even
> supporting 8bpp color.
>
> The X servers were necessary for a VME bus card version of the
> XL400/XL1200 that plugged into a Sun 3 system. Its terminal was the
> Sun's X server. Later products included a standalone XL1201 box that
> could be used in a similar manner without needing a head.
Ah yes, the UX400. I had one of those plugged into a Sun-4. A pretty nice
system, that was substantially faster than the 3620 I had been using prior
to that... I continued to use it until the compile times on a
Sparcstation-20 blew it away by such a large margin that we switched to a
unix based lisp for further development.. Which turned out to be opportune
because we next hit the upper limits of CLIM and had to switch to Motif for
further UI development.
>
> 'james
Franz Kafka
> > Patents last 20 years; corporate copyrights for American companies
> > are up to about a century now and getting longer every time Mickey
> > Mouse threatens to escape his continuing enslavement by Disney (who
> > ought to be ashamed of themselves for their baldfaced robbery of the
> > public domain, but that's another rant).
> >
> > What that means is that 20 years after they produced it, (which
> > judging by the last publication dates of the manuals would be
> > around 2011, or judging from the first versions would be about
> > now) you can copy any ideas or techniques in a new work. But
> > you can't use their source code without permission in this
> > lifetime, unless Disney is first destroyed. And even if Disney
> > is destroyed, it probably won't be less than three-quarters of a
> > century.
>
People can anonymously use 20 year old source code. I don't think
lawyers will be willing to spend millions trying to track down a
hacker using an ip-spoofer or an anonymous remailer. And, unlike Mickey Mouse
once it's out it's out.
The GNU folks are not looking to turn a profit only to release freeware.
If the twenty year or even ten year old code is released--the cat would
be out of the bag; once the code is posted just try to stop hardware
hackers and Lisp hackers from using it.
TI doen't even remember the explorer; I don't think they'd try to stop
it release.
Kent M Pitman
> In article <m3llyr6...@kappa.unlambda.com>,
> James A. Crippen <ja...@unlambda.com> wrote:
> >LMI later was swallowed by TI. If that helps make things clear.
>
> I don't think so. TI licensed LMI's technology to create the Explorer, but
> I don't think they ever acquired the company itself. IIRC, LMI was
> acquired by Gigamos, and then they either stopped marketing the LMI
> products or went out of business as well.
I thought I had heard, though it might be incorrect, that TI bought
something like 20% or 25% or something like that of LMI in order to
get that technology... but in any case, I agree with Barry that LMI
was not wholly swallowed by TI.
Franz Kafka
Lispm--I think we should release an opensource version of
the explorer OS.
We could start by puting Exploror tapes and Lisp sources on
the Internet.
TI is pretending Explorer's don't exist--
they kinda gave up the Copyright, I think.
The sources from the CADR, and LM-2 could be posted on the net
if people still have them.
THANKS
Frank A. Adrian
> The line between system programming and user-programming was totally
> blurred, which was double-edged. I once found a user who had crashed
> their machine by redefining the Zetalisp TIME function, which was used
> for the system clock.
Yes. As always, the ability to dynamically change the environment is a
mixed blessing. I've often cruched an image in Smalltalk systems and am
just getting to the point on my lisp machine where I can experience the
same joy :-).
It still doesn't seem to me that many of the folks around here understand
just how important it is that the Lispiness of the system goes way past the
software level and down into the hardware. One could achieve the same feel
of a Lisp machine by building a LAP-like compiler for an Intel chip, and
coding the compiler, GC, device drivers, scheduler, etc. in Lisp. And, for
99.9% of hackers out there, that would be sufficient. But in the end, the
code at the bottom would still look like a set of x86 code and the mapping
from Lisp constructs into this code would be non-obvious and be a
conceptual hazard. This is why the hardware constructs at the bottom of
the hierarchy are so important. You know that some crappy pointer access
in the middle of the emulation of the PLUS instruction is going to blow you
out of the Lisp world and into the x86 world. Not that this sort of thing
couldn't occur in the lisp machine world - you could always hit a crummy
bit of microcode. But in the end, the microcode still made sense in the
context of a single Lisp instruction. This would not be the case in the
emulated environment because most compiler writers wouldn't stop
optimization at the Lisp-op level - they'd always be tempted to mush Lisp
operations together to make things run faster and, when something went
wrong - BAM! - your face is pushed into a bunch of random x86 code again,
most of which represent a mishmash of overlapping Lisp instructions. And
that, my friends, would just suck...
faa
Marc Spitzer
> > >
> > > Patents last 20 years; corporate copyrights for American companies
> > > are up to about a century now and getting longer every time Mickey
> > > Mouse threatens to escape his continuing enslavement by Disney (who
> > > ought to be ashamed of themselves for their baldfaced robbery of the
> > > public domain, but that's another rant).
> > >
> > > What that means is that 20 years after they produced it, (which
> > > judging by the last publication dates of the manuals would be
> > > around 2011, or judging from the first versions would be about
> > > now) you can copy any ideas or techniques in a new work. But
> > > you can't use their source code without permission in this
> > > lifetime, unless Disney is first destroyed. And even if Disney
> > > is destroyed, it probably won't be less than three-quarters of a
> > > century.
> >
>
> People can anonymously use 20 year old source code. I don't think
> lawyers will be willing to spend millions trying to track down a
> hacker using an ip-spoofer or an anonymous remailer. And, unlike
> Mickey Mouse once it's out it's out.
Well your argument is that you can steal and not be worth catching is
interesting for your opinion of private property. Society thinks that
stealing is bad and enacts laws to prevent and punish theft. And if
Mickey Mouse ever gets in the public domain it will stay there, Disney
will have failed.
>
> The GNU folks are not looking to turn a profit only to release freeware.
> If the twenty year or even ten year old code is released--the cat would
> be out of the bag; once the code is posted just try to stop hardware
> hackers and Lisp hackers from using it.
From what I have observed the gnu folks have a very specific
social/political agenda that they pursue through the gpl and
systematically lying about what it means to use it, redefining "free" to
a definition that I have never seen in a dictionary comes to mind. I
also remember the claim that the fsf made about code generated from
their tools being gpled. They claimed that bison and gcc output files
were under the gpl, if I remember correctly. This claim did not last
long, get this crap out of my shop said management(cheaper to buy the
compiler from sun).
>
> TI doen't even remember the explorer; I don't think they'd try to stop
> it release.
I do not agree. Even if there is no immediate and direct losses it is
dangerous for a owner not to protect his property. The reason for
this is that when you do not protect part of it you open the rest of
it for attack. So instead of having to pay for one legal action you now
have to deal with 10. Part of the reason for unix's success is that
in its early non product days it was ATT's property and you *did not
mess with ATT's legal department*. Also by not protecting it, if it
is used by some third party to do something bad, you may be sued
because you encouraged them to do this by not taking any action( think
implied consent). This is much more likely if you have more money
then the other people involved.
marc
Marc Spitzer
> Since Symbolics may still be in business, and TI scraped there
> Lispm--I think we should release an opensource version of
> the explorer OS.
That require TI to release the code or to do a clean room
version.
>
> We could start by puting Exploror tapes and Lisp sources on
> the Internet.
This is theft, pure and simple, with out written permission
from TI. Also TI may be bound by its licensing agreement
so it could not release the code even if it wanted to.
>
> TI is pretending Explorer's don't exist--
> they kinda gave up the Copyright, I think.
And you are ignorant. This means your opinion
is worth nothing.
>
> The sources from the CADR, and LM-2 could be posted on the net
> if people still have them.
>
> THANKS
no problem
marc
Bernd Paysan
> Well your argument is that you can steal and not be worth catching is
> interesting for your opinion of private property. Society thinks that
> stealing is bad and enacts laws to prevent and punish theft. And if
> Mickey Mouse ever gets in the public domain it will stay there, Disney
> will have failed.
Disney doesn't make much money out of rehasing old 30s Mickey Mouse books
(maybe they could today by rehashing the hooray-patriotic Mickey Mouse of
the early 40s ;-). They make money out of writing new Mickey Mouse stories,
and Mickey Mouse itself has changed quite a lot since (it started as a
black mouse with short trousers and a tail, which acted as a slapstick
character - nowadays, no tail, normal clothing, and it's a detective). The
current Mickey Mouse would still be under copyright protection if the
original one was set free.
I'd like Walt Disney to pay a few billions to the heirs of the Grimm
Brothers for "stealing" Snowwhite and Cinderella. Fair is fair. If you want
copyright to last for infinity minus one, you ought to pay the price.
Note also that copying is not theft, quite the contrary. Copying is a
natural law, restricted by gouvernment for a limited time, so copyright is
the reverse of a natural law, while property is a natural law, and
restrictions to property (such as taxes and regulations) need to have
exceptional status, too.
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
Christopher C. Stacy
bear> And I'd hesitate to assign too much responsibility for EMACS
bear> to MIT -- EMACS is mostly the result of the obsession of a
bear> single individual.
Your above statements are not very accurate.
Franz Kafka
> Here's a line from COMPILER;COMPILE.LISP:
>
> ;;; Copyright (C) 1980, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
>
fsf he might be willing to gpl the code for the Lispm that MIT
developed. I know that we can't get Symbolic's extensions; I found
that they are still in business--I might even buy a system from them
as soon as I can get some money. We might be able to talk TI into
releaseing their extensions--along with LMI's extensions--because
both products are not longer maintained or sold.
I'm sure that if MIT releases the sources that they own, the Lisp
community will produce a new OS from the base system that is owned
by MIT--I'm not saying that this will happen overnight, but it will
happen eventually.
I also hope that some company will offer a Lispm Environment for sale
with a good price for students, I know I'll buy one if the price is
reasonable. (>$500 for students; full time students can't afford much
more.)
How good was Meledy as a Lispm Environment; I think it's student price
was $250 if you can still get it. (How does it compair to Genera?)
Donald Fisk
Also Prolog, at least on Symbolics Genera.
Le Hibou
--
In any large organization, mediocrity is almost by definition
an overwhelming phenomenon; the systematic disqualification
of competence, however, is the managers' own invention, for
the sad consequences of which they should bear the full blame.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra, 1986.
Florian Weimer
> Yes. As always, the ability to dynamically change the environment is a
> mixed blessing. I've often cruched an image in Smalltalk systems and am
> just getting to the point on my lisp machine where I can experience the
> same joy :-).
One day, I hope to combine Lisp-style "hacking the running process"
with POSIX fork() -- so that you can test things in a copy of the
process first. (This is not trivial in the cases I'm interested in
because they involve a lot of networking.)
> This would not be the case in the emulated environment because most
> compiler writers wouldn't stop optimization at the Lisp-op level -
> they'd always be tempted to mush Lisp operations together to make
> things run faster and, when something went wrong - BAM! - your face
> is pushed into a bunch of random x86 code again, most of which
> represent a mishmash of overlapping Lisp instructions. And that, my
> friends, would just suck...
Even if you renounce optimization for that reason, such x86 code would
probably run faster than any Lisp processor you could afford to build.
Barry Margolin
Mario S. Mommer <m_mo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Donald Fisk <hibou000...@enterprise.net> writes:
>> Martti Halminen wrote:
>> > Kent M Pitman wrote:
>> >
>> > > Lisp Machines did have implementations of Fortran
>> > > and other languages (Pascal and Ada, I think)
>> >
>> > Also C (pre-ANSI).
>>
>> Also Prolog, at least on Symbolics Genera.
>
I think someone at Thinking Machines wrote a *BASIC implementation that ran
on the Lispm/Connection Machine combination.
Kent M Pitman
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PFAQ/cross-posting.html ]
Symbolics_XL1201...@hotmail.com (Franz Kafka) writes:
> TI is pretending Explorer's don't exist--
> they kinda gave up the Copyright, I think.
The former statement suggests knowledge and willful intent to mislead.
The more likely truth is that they don't have anyone whose job it is
to remember. I doubt they would deny it if they knew. They might not
be any more helpful, but they have no motivation to hide the history.
The use of the connective em-dash suggests that you think the former
statement supports the latter conclusion. I don't see any reason to
suppose they gave up the Copyright. Copyright cannot be "given up".
It has to be transferred in writing by explicit action.
Also, "although I am not a lawyer", I'd wager that "kinda" is not an
appropriate term of art for any serious conclusion under intellectual
property law.
Moreover, if they did know they had the intellectual property, and if
they knew where the sources resided physically, and they had someone
competent to know what it was, I doubt they would want to give it up.
Selling it off to someone else who wanted to give them real money would
sound more likely.
Even fans of free software would presumably have to agree that TI has
little to gain from contributing this stuff since (a) they don't plan
to make money by supporting it, (b) they don't plan to make money by
selling the hardware, and (c) there probably exists someone who would
pay them cash. The ordinary arguments for free software are usually
that either there's a strategy for making money on some other aspect
of it after giving it away or [as in (a)&(b) or other similar
strategies, such as vertical markets, etc.] or else they don't think
someone else sees commercial value in it. Note that a free software
advocate who really believes all this tommyrot about money to be made
in support could put their money where their mouth is and offer cash
to TI for the sources, then open source them (giving away what they
just paid cold cash for) and then hope they could make it back on
whatever business plan they are always telling others would work so
well.
Barry Margolin
Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> wrote:
>The line between system programming and user-programming was totally
>blurred, which was double-edged. I once found a user who had crashed
>their machine by redefining the Zetalisp TIME function, which was used
>for the system clock.
And we once crashed the system with something analogous to:
(setq some-variable t)
(set some-variable nil)
thus creating a 1984-ish environment where truth is falsehood, and all hell
breaks loose.
SETQ had a special check for the first argument being T or NIL (like
Maclisp's "Veritas Aeternas" error), but SET didn't. In the next release
the value cell of T was moved to a read-only page.
You could also seriously screw things up by tracing functions that were
used to implement TRACE, e.g. (trace prin1). Lispms gave you plenty of
rope to hang yourself with, but the benefits outweighed the costs
significantly.
Kent M Pitman
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PFAQ/cross-posting.html ]
Marc Spitzer <mspi...@optonline.net> writes:
> Symbolics_XL1201...@hotmail.com (Franz Kafka) writes:
>
> > People can anonymously use 20 year old source code. I don't think
> > lawyers will be willing to spend millions trying to track down a
> > hacker using an ip-spoofer or an anonymous remailer. And, unlike
> > Mickey Mouse once it's out it's out.
>
> Well your argument is that you can steal and not be worth catching is
> interesting for your opinion of private property. Society thinks that
> stealing is bad and enacts laws to prevent and punish theft. And if
> Mickey Mouse ever gets in the public domain it will stay there, Disney
> will have failed.
You might want to look up what the statutory damages are for
copyright infringement, but just about any lawyer would take them on
contingency because
(a) they are enormous ($750-$30,000 statutory damages just for showing
there was an infringement of a registered work, and up to $150,000
if you can prove the infringement is "willful". What's evidence of
willfulness? Hmmm. Good question. I wonder if saying "People can
anonymously use 20 year old source code. I don't think lawyers
will be willing to spend millions trying to track down..." on a
permanent, globally available medium like Usenet would qualify...?
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/504.html
(b) as to the question of the millions that the lawyers will spend,
"Sec. 505. - Remedies for infringement: Costs and attorney's fees
In any civil action under this title, the court in its discretion
may allow the recovery of full costs by or against any party other
than the United States or an officer thereof. Except as otherwise
provided by this title, the court may also award a reasonable
attorney's fee to the prevailing party as part of the costs."
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/505.html
As a general rule, I've been told that it's not wise to talk about
willfully violating a copyright just because you don't think someone
will have the money to go after you...