Older blog entries for nmw (starting at number 3)

tbmoore: I've never bothered with emacs and elisp. Isn't the lack of closures in elisp obnoxious?

BTW, I'm one of the few proud owners of a copy of "On Lisp", one of the best computer science books ever. The fascinating thing is that Paul Graham wrote Yahoo Shopper in Common Lisp and made millions doing it. In LISP!

I've been thinking about Lisp a lot recently.

I think Lisp could use a few small extensions. One would be to make CONS sub-classable. This would help, for example, with XML, kinda like Perl 6's [vapourware] per-scalar, per-symbol property values, but I also see much value in writing a compiler: code analysis information could be stored in new fields in the conses of an s-expression without modifying the form of the expression. Such an extension would also require an extension to dot notation so extended conses could be printed and read.

Another extension that would be nice is what I think of as "forward closures", much like Pascal or GCC local functions, which are closures that are defined only as long as the parent function instance does not exit. There is a safety issue with such forward values, of course, but the value of forward closures is that it can make continuation passing style code more efficient by not requiring heap storage for captured variables. And this (CPS) is needed to implement logic programming languages like Prolog or Icon. And I would really like to be able to program in Lisp with Icon semantics.

But this is all kinda academic... I'm not working on that sort of stuff...

lkcl: dunno who nigel is :), but why would you port Python code to C (speed?)? or think that porting python to C would be easy?

Porting python to Lisp might be easy.

See Python v(or rather i)s Lisp.

Once you're porgramming at a high-level, to go back to the low-level is hard -- a straight port would require list/hash table libraries, maybe ffcall and the like, all of which makes it pointless to go to the low-level. It would be better to just have a decently fast high level language.

Mind you, I'm not trying to evangelize. You do what you want :)

Besides, there's no ideal computer language, though Lisp gets pretty close (IMNSHO).

Cheers,

Nico

lkcl: sounds like you're doing non-deterministic stuff, like you could use a language that has backtracking and pruning built-in. Something like Prolog, or Icon.

lkcl's mod_virgule mods are great, and his recent work on a command line version opens up some interesting possibilities, such as scripting an e-mail->mod_virgule gateway.

Think about it. You could post diary entries, articles, replies, URLs, messages to individuals, certifications and messages to mailing lists via e-mail. One neat side-effect of this would be the ability to use PGP/GPG for post authentication.

Take a look at lkcl's demo site, or the Open-IT site (which uses lkcl's mod_virgule) for an idea of what could be done with the Advogato model. Pay close attention to the concept of interest certifications and searching based on a seed person's certifications. Very cool.

Now imagine applying this model to mailing lists as well. One could certify threads/messages as 'Intriguing' or 'Fascinating', one could annotate useful threads/messages, much as one can annotate URLs. One could search using a seed person's cert metrics as a search term.

Nico