HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: fateman@peoplesparc.Berkeley.EDU (Richard Fateman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: COBOL is a mainstream language. So what? (was Re: Lisp vs English)
Date: 27 Jan 1993 17:06:20 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: peoplesparc.berkeley.edu
Summary: Some niches are larger than others

Lisp is not a mainstream language, but COBOL is. Perhaps BASIC also.
(You may think C and Fortran are mainstream, but I'm not sure how
you are measuring.)  COBOL is, in some ways being replaced by
"4th generation languages".  Not by C or C++. Certainly not by LISP.

How come?
1. COBOL is standardized.  (CL is getting that way, maybe.)
2. COBOL is or was a required language for US gov't procurement.
3. COBOL became the defacto standard for a commercially important segment
   of the computer buying community because of 1 & 2.

4. It would be pointless to argue in this newsgroup about the relevant
   syntax and semantics of COBOL vs. Lisp.

5. COBOL existed at the right time and place to fill a particular niche.
   Not the niche filled by LISP, but a niche.  LISP's niche is smaller,
   perhaps.

How is it that people reading (or writing) here think that C is a mainstream
language?

Perhaps because they perceive that the niche for C programs is better
known and/or larger.  What is that niche?

1. writing UN*X operating systems.
2. writing compilers, interpreters (including Lisp interpreters!), editors.
3. writing other low-to-middle level code that needs access to OS utilities
   and should, itself, be useful as a utility (i.e. small in size).
4. (ugh) education, since some educators think that popular = good.

Some people would claim Fortran is a mainstream language (although
the number of people using COBOL totally swamps the Fortran community).
My argument here would be that there is a niche, and frankly, Fortran,
in its various versions, pretty much fills that niche as a (mostly batch)
numeric processing language.

Lisp pretty much fills its niche (competing perhaps with Prolog?, competing
amongst dialects? competing with C?)

If your idea of mainstreaming Lisp is that you should do something to
it so that it would invade other niches, I'm not sure how to do that,
but making it small/fast/efficient would make it more plausible.
Providing a front end for COBOL  or a front end for C, which would
erase all syntactic or semantic differences (ugh!) does not seem like
a winning idea ...

Demonstrations of superiority in a niche -- the way the 4GLs are
displacing COBOL -- may be the way to broaden the appeal of CL...
Write truly great programs in Lisp to solve important and
widespread problems -- and rely on Lisp in such a way that the
program can't be rewritten in C "to save space/time/money..".
Symbolic mathematics programs like Macsyma and Reduce looked like this,
until people wrote similar systems in C (Maple, Mathematica).


-- 
Richard J. Fateman
fateman@cs.berkeley.edu   510 642-1879
From: emcoop@bnr.ca (hume smith)
Subject: big numbers (was Re: Lisp syntax beauty?)
Organization: Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada
	<19930122162651.0.SWM@SUMMER.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
	<dfs.727723285@noonian> <1jpe0qINNnf1@tamsun.tamu.edu>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 20:14:58 GMT

this is probably the first cross-post between these two groups :-)

In article <1jpe0qINNnf1@tamsun.tamu.edu> hmueller@orca.tamu.edu (Hal Mueller) writes:

   In article <dfs.727723285@noonian> dfs@doe.carleton.ca (David F. Skoll) writes:
   >who really needs the number 394829348234982435 formatted in English words??
   >Just try (format t "~R~%" 394829348234982435) for fun!

printing cheques from the US gov't to its defence contractors?  but that's mostly
in Cobol i suppose...  perhaps the mexican gov't...  all those pesos...

   Well, if i DID need it, I'd hate to write it!  Fortran and C versions
   are left as an exercise.

(for alt.usage.english readers - lisp's ~R format directive, according to the
draft ANSI standard, will print an integer in one of four formats; english
cardinal (4 -> four), english ordinal (4 -> fourth), "new roman" (4 -> IV),
and "old roman" (4 -> IIII).)

i have a few questions about ~R, some of which are lisp questions, and some
english.  if any appreciable discussion ensues, i should probably try to
split the thread (unravel it?) into the two groups.  (i'm probably stretching
it even to start the two together.)

- the draft is silent about what to do with nonpositives, especially
  for roman numerals.  should the english cardinal of -1 be "minus one" or
  "negative one"?  (i prefer the latter - minus, to me, is the operator
  not the additive inverse.)  what should happen with the others?
  does "zeroth" make sense to anyone other than a thermodynamicist? :-)

- which english style should BIG numbers (such as Mr. Skoll provided)
  be written into?  i assume, since it's the AMERICAN national standards
  institute, they mean the american way - million, billion, trillion,
  etc.  not the english million, milliard, billion, billiard (?), etc.
  or will the standard permit/expect adaption to locale, using milliard
  in York and billion in New York?  does the usual system locale setup stuff
  even handle this kind of information?

- (definitely an alt.usage.english question) what is the progression
  for very large numbers?  mi-, bi-, tri-, quad-, quint-, sext-, sept-,
  oct-, non-, dec-; then what?  i remember something like vingintillion
  in american for 1000^(20+1)...

i'm not asking idly; i hope to begin giving XLisp bignums, and would
like to provide as much of ~R as i possibly can as well, just 'cause
it's so cute! :-)

(and to Mr. Mueller: i've written such an expander in Basic; it really
isn't so bad.  the three-digit cycle helps a lot.)
--
Hume Smith                                Honour sick and davey cris-cross
hume.smith@acadiau.ca                     McTruloff sentimie
emcoop@bnr.ca                             A parsnip inner pair threes.
From: flv@stl.dk (Flemming Vestergaard)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Lisp syntax beauty? (was Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?)
Date: 26 Jan 93 09:10:01 GMT
Organization: Soeren T. Lyngsoe, Hoersholm, Denmark

In <dfs.727723285@noonian> dfs@doe.carleton.ca (David F. Skoll) writes:

>I've noticed a thread extolling the beauty of Lisp syntax.  While I agree
>that mostly, Lisp syntax is easy to understand and consistent, I wonder
>what sort of mental disease struck the creators for the "format" function.
>Take a look at all the baroque format directives in Common Lisp.  I mean,
>who really needs the number 394829348234982435 formatted in English words??
>Just try (format t "~R~%" 394829348234982435) for fun!

Well, it is fun. But from this corner of the world I suppose that it is
a more serious problem (if not a disaster) that Common Lisp provides 
input and output functions that are suited only for English/American.

(format t "~R" 4) -> four really doesn't help very much in most of the world.
And yes-or-no-p cannot be used either.

I do think it is a mistake to include natural language specific functions
in a language standard.

Flemming
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme
From: root@ute.Columbia.NCR.COM ()
Subject: SCM Wishlist (Was: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?)
Summary: Wanted: weak-cons
Organization: NCR Corp, E&M-Columbia, Columbia, SC
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 93 21:41:44 GMT

In article <JAFFER.93Jan27143229@camelot.ai.mit.edu>
   jaffer@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Aubrey Jaffer) writes:
>Some things which could be added to SCM are:
>  Profiling (how much time spent in each routine)
>  Dynamic Linking (There is a GNU package which does this on Unix
>        systems and Carrette has also suggested a fairly portable method)
>  Editor (buffers + GNU search + curses)
>  String Ports (someone has sent me code for this but I haven't had
>        time to integrate it)

I vote for weak-cons so that Thomas (DEC's almost-Dylan) can be ported to it.

(BTW, SCM is very nice.  Thanks Aubrey!)

Barry Shelton
barry@ute.columbiasc.ncr.com
From: arditi@granit.unice.fr (Arditi Laurent)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: CLISP for Atari ST
Date: 25 Jan 1993 13:22:51 GMT
Organization: University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: granit.unice.fr


	I'm looking for a version of CLISP running on Atari ST newer than
	the novembre 91's one.

	If you've got a COMPILED version, please Email me.





-- 
*******************************************************************************
       Laurent Arditi  (arditi@essi.cerisi.fr  arditi@granit.unice.fr)
"Daddy didn't give attention...to the fact that Mommy didn't care" - PEARL JAM
"If you're not now, you never were" - ST     "Life rules !" - JANE'S ADDICTION
*******************************************************************************
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.lisp.x
From: ted@nmsu.edu (Ted Dunning)
Subject: Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?
Organization: Computing Research Lab
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 19:56:53 GMT


In article <2413@sousa.tay.dec.com> secrist@msdsws.enet.dec.com
(Strong datatypes for weak minds.) writes:


   Perhaps Scheme and Dylan are the last, best hope to dent the
   mainstream.


given the mindset of the people who effectively control the evolution
of scheme, there is absolutely no hope of scheme becoming a useable
language for mainstream programming.

i am not saying that the mindset is wrong, just that it completely
prevents the language from going in the directions needed to be a
really useable and marketable language.
From: krulwich@zowie.ils.nwu.edu (Bruce Krulwich)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Lisp syntax beauty? (was Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?)
Date: 25 Jan 93 16:22:51 GMT
Article-I.D.: zowie.KRULWICH.93Jan25102251
	<19930122162651.0.SWM@SUMMER.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
	<dfs.727723285@noonian> <1jpi0sINN47q@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov>
	<dfs.727732459@kehleyr>
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences, Evanston, IL


> You are right.  I wrote my article hastily.  But the "format" function is
> representative of one aspect of Common Lisp which I believe prevents it from
> becoming a "mainstream" language - Common Lisp attempts to do almost
> everything, with the result that 90% of the Lisp image is devoted to
> functions a small-to-medium program will never use.

It seems to me that if you mentally think of the language spec as what in
other languages would be "language + standard libraries," things make much
more sense.  The fact that LISP systems are based on run-time environments and
REPL modes makes it hard to provide a good seperation between the two, and in
any case from a language definition point of view there's no diffference
(unless you want things to be optional, the way scheme does).

Bruce

 
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: gandalf@sabrina.dei.unipd.it (ROBERTO AVANZI)
Subject: Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?
Organization: D.E.I. Universita' di Padova, Italia
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 09:45:25 GMT

In article <1993Jan20.181244.8680@netlabs.com> lwall@netlabs.com (Larry Wall) writes:
>
>Please reply in Lisp, not English.  It's so much more expressive...
>
>Larry Wall
>lwall@netlabs.com

: (GETPROP 'LISP 'BEAUTY)
"MARVELOUS"

: (GETPROP 'PERL 'USEFULNESS)
"GREAT"

Cheers
Roberto Avanzi
From: jimc@tekcae.cax.tek.com (Jim Carden)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?
Date: 23 Jan 93 15:26:01 GMT
Organization: Mitron Corp., Beaverton,  OR.

[[** Posted for patl@goldfish.mitron.tek.com **]]

In article <1993Jan23.073029.29713@linus.mitre.org> crawford@boole.mitre.org (Randy Crawford) writes:
>However I think the real case to be made for Lisp's relative illegibility 
>is one of procedural languages vs. functional languages.  When a process is
>decomposed into separate tasks which are presented sequentially, the reader
>has the least work to do in understanding the intent of the programmer.
>Whenever processes are nested and one process generates temporary values
>which are then fed directly into other processes, as in Lisp, the delineation
>between tasks (prior vs. successor) is less clear.  Certainly we don't write 
>english sentences from the inside out, why should we expect programmers to 
>read source code which is written that way?

There's an interesting point. What other notations are there to improve on this? 
The most common is naming intermediate values. For this I prefer CL and Scheme's
LET or Dylan's BIND to C's (and Pascal, Ada, Modula, etc.) assignment semantics.

I use LET throughout my code and rarely have deeply nested functional expressions.

>When stripped of its extensions and superb development environment,
>Lisp doesn't appear to me to have a clear upper hand over a language like
>Modula 2 or even Ada, not in any general sense.  It's not more legible,
>more intuitive, more efficient in execution.  Lisp fares most poorly (IMHO) 
>when compared like this with newer languages like Modula 3, which were 
>designed largely for their legibility and modularity.

These are mostly subjective values, so to each his own. Modern LISPs' lexical 
scopes, closures, and macros allow me to be significantly more expressive
than with any of the other languages you mentioned. (I have programmed extensively
in CL, Scheme, C, and C++. I have used the others enough to know what they're
like.)

>Prefix notation and functional expressions are two `gotos considered good'
>in Lisp.  Violating either of these will either shut down your equations
>or excommunicate yourself from the Brotherhood.  They're both proscriptive.

I could build a calendar based on threads like this one just as accurate 
as the Mayan's. This is a recurring, subjective topic. Your mileage will
certainly vary.
--
Patrick Logan, patl@goldfish.mitron.tek.com, (503) 690-8350

Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: akman@trbilun.bitnet (Varol Akman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Lisp syntax beauty? (was Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?)
Summary: format
Date: 27 Jan 93 06:45:52 GMT
Reply-To: akman@dicle.UUCP (Varol Akman)
Organization: Bilkent University Ankara-Turkey

In article <dfs.727723285@noonian> dfs@doe.carleton.ca (David F. Skoll) writes:
>       [parts omitted]
>Take a look at all the baroque format directives in Common Lisp.  I mean,
>who really needs the number 394829348234982435 formatted in English words??
>

I think I do! (But for Turkish words, and I think that would be easy to
do since there is a rather trivial 1-1 mapping.)
Here we fill a ridiculous government form every month (just to claim
some money back in return for receipts for goods with a value-added tax)
and the form won't be accepted unless you you write the sum total
in Turkish.  Unfortunately my totals hardly approach the neighborhood of the
number you've cited  :-) :-)

Varol Akman
Department of Computer Engineering and Information Science
Bilkent University, Bilkent, Ankara 06533, Turkey
E-mail: akman@trbilun.bitnet

Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: dfs@doe.carleton.ca (David F. Skoll)
Subject: Re: Lisp syntax beauty? (was Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?)
Organization: Dept. of Electronics, Carleton University
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 02:50:43 GMT

In <KPC.93Jan22142048@zog.arc.nasa.gov> kpc@pluto.arc.nasa.gov (k p c) writes:

>there are technical solutions to that problem, aren't there?  i recall
>there being something called presto that would eliminate parts of lisp
>that weren't being used.

Two problems - it's a bit of a "kludge" - for best performance, you
have to "train" presto to recognize which parts should be loaded and
which shouldn't.  That's a bit tedious and adds nothing to your
productivity.  Secondly, it's not part of the CL standard, so if you
port your software to another implementation, there's no guarantee
that it will have presto.

--
David F. Skoll
From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer)
Subject: Re: CMU-CL on HP platform?
Organization: Hanse Networking e. V., Hamburg, Germany
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 93 07:50:59 GMT

sef@sef-pmax.slisp.cs.cmu.edu writes:


>    From: ramanath+@pitt.edu (Jayaram Ramanathan)
>    
>    Last summer, I came across a public domain version of CMU Common Lisp for
>    the Sun platform.  Since then, due to various reasons, I went ahead and got
>    myself (in my office) an HP workstation.  I'm curious to find out if CMU-CL
>    is now available for the HP platform.
>    
>Not yet.  Maybe someday.

Do you know, if CMU-CL is running under Solaris 2 an SPARCs and if
there will be a native Solaris-2 version ?
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>, WAVEDATA, Norderstedt, Germany
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: ted@nmsu.edu (Ted Dunning)
Subject: Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?
Organization: Computing Research Lab
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 19:56:42 GMT


In article <2413@sousa.tay.dec.com> secrist@msdsws.enet.dec.com
(Strong datatypes for weak minds.) writes:


   Perhaps Scheme and Dylan are the last, best hope to dent the
   mainstream.


given the mindset of the people who effectively control the evolution
of scheme, there is absolutely no hope of scheme becoming a useable
language for mainstream programming.

i am not saying that the mindset is wrong, just that it completely
prevents the language from going in the directions needed to be a
really useable and marketable language.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme
From: thinman@netcom.com (Technically Sweet)
Subject: Re: SCM Wishlist
Organization: International Foundation for Internal Freedom
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 18:14:51 GMT

I find that the development environment is just as important
as the language itself.  I want a windowed browsing/control
environment written in Scheme; there are several free universal
window system libraries that could support a portable environment.

-- 

Lance Norskog
thinman@netcom.com
Data is not information is not knowledge is not wisdom.
From: haible@ma2s2.uucp (Bruno Haible)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?
Date: 23 Jan 1993 00:59:39 GMT
Organization: University of Karlsruhe, Germany
NNTP-Posting-Host: ma2s2.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de
Summary: use Lisp for scientific programs
Keywords: numerics, Lisp, Maclisp, Fortran

SWM@stony-brook.scrc.symbolics.com (Scott McKay) writes:

> And why not use Fortran for some scientific hacking?

What was wrong with Maclisp's numeric code? What is wrong with Lisp compilers
that have unboxed representations for floating point numbers?

Aren't the bignums and bigfloats Fortran lacks never useful for scientific
computations?

Bruno Haible
haible@ma2s2.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de

Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: schneide@divsun.unige.ch (SCHNEIDER daniel)
Subject: Need help with macro writing
Organization: University of Geneva, Switzerland
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 21:50:13 GMT

Hi folks,

I am a bit stuck with macro writing. I'd like to translate this:

(with-output-as-presentation1 (:stream t :type tt :object ttt) (print object) (bla bla))

into this:

(WITH-OUTPUT-AS-PRESENTATION (T TT TTT) (PRINT OBJECT) (BLA BLA))

All I found was this:

(defun find-key (key liste)
  (second (member key liste)))

(defmacro with-output-as-presentation1 ((&rest arg) &rest body)
  (let ((stream1 (find-key ':stream arg))
	(type1 	(find-key ':type arg))
	(object1 (find-key ':object arg)))
    `(with-output-as-presentation (,stream1 ,type1 ,object1)
       ,@body)))

Looks very ugly to me. I couldn't figure out a way to use keywords in this macro.
Could any helpful soul help me what to look for ? Thanks for any help/hints !!



---
Daniel K.Schneider, TECFA (Educational Technologies and Learning)
Faculte de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, University of Geneva,
9 route de Drize, 1227 Carouge(Switzerland),
Phone: (..41) 22 705 9694, Fax: (..41) 22 342 89 24

Internet:   schneide@divsun.unige.ch  (and various national nets)    | if reply
X400:       S=schneide;OU=divsun;O=unige;PRMD=switch;ADMD=arcom;C=ch | does not
uucp:       mcvax!cui!divsun.unige.ch!shneider                       | work, try
BITNET:     schneide@cgeuge51                                        | one of
DECNET:     UGUN2A::SCHNEIDE (local Swiss)                           | these


Xref: sparky comp.lang.lisp:3353 alt.usage.english:11009
From: Cannam@sc.ZIB-Berlin.de (Chris Cannam)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: big numbers (was Re: Lisp syntax beauty?)
Date: 25 Jan 93 14:15:29
Organization: Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum fuer Informationstechnik Berlin
Distribution: alt
	<19930122162651.0.SWM@SUMMER.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
	<dfs.727723285@noonian> <1jpe0qINNnf1@tamsun.tamu.edu>
	<EMCOOP.93Jan22151458@bcars148.bnr.ca>
NNTP-Posting-Host: borodin.zib-berlin.de
In-reply-to: emcoop@bnr.ca's message of Fri, 22 Jan 1993 20:14:58 GMT



All right.  Not a subject I know all that much about, but it's quite
interesting.

In article <EMCOOP.93Jan22151458@bcars148.bnr.ca> emcoop@bnr.ca (hume
smith) writes:

   - the draft is silent about what to do with nonpositives, especially
     for roman numerals.

Should it do anything useful for nonpositive Roman numerals?  After
all, the Romans didn't even use nonpositive numerals, so why should
you?  There's surely no reasonably Roman representation of zero.

     should the english cardinal of -1 be "minus one" or
     "negative one"?  (i prefer the latter - minus, to me, is the operator
     not the additive inverse.)

I usually prefer the former, because presumably the intention is to
produce text that is smoothly readable to people without scientific
backgrounds.  `Negative one' reads like a scientific term; `minus one'
reads like English.  Yes, of course, you can then run into problems
with mixing `minus' as unary and binary operators, but if you want
clarity and consistency above everything, you shouldn't be trying to
write in English.

   - which english style should BIG numbers (such as Mr. Skoll provided)
     be written into?  i assume, since it's the AMERICAN national standards
     institute, they mean the american way - million, billion, trillion,
     etc.  not the english million, milliard, billion, billiard (?), etc.

I think most British are probably just as familiar these days with the
American numbering as with the British, but I don't think it's safe to
use either with British English speakers unless you're quite clear
about which you're using.

     or will the standard permit/expect adaption to locale, using milliard
     in York and billion in New York?

Things could get a bit confusing this way, but of course if it's
cuteness value you're after, well, why not?

     does the usual system locale setup stuff
     even handle this kind of information?

I very much doubt it.

   (and to Mr. Mueller: i've written such an expander in Basic; it really
   isn't so bad.  the three-digit cycle helps a lot.)

Anyone remember `Lords of Midnight' (and its sequel), the computer
games that formatted numbers in a sort of antique style: Two hundred,
four score and ten brave warriors have boldly snuffed it, etc.?

							Chris

--
           on sighting mathematicians it should unhook the algebra from their
             minds and replace it with poetry;  on sighting poets it should
               unhook poetry from their minds and replace it with algebra

Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: fy@lucid.com (Frank Yellin)
Subject: Re: Need help with macro writing
Organization: Lucid, Inc., Menlo Park, CA
Date: 26 Jan 93 16:18:03


In article <1993Jan26.215013.12107@news.unige.ch> schneide@divsun.unige.ch
(SCHNEIDER daniel) writes: 

>
>   Hi folks,
>
>   I am a bit stuck with macro writing. I'd like to translate this:
>
>   (with-output-as-presentation1 (:stream t :type tt :object ttt)
>         (print object) (bla bla))
>
>   into this:
>
>   (WITH-OUTPUT-AS-PRESENTATION (T TT TTT) (PRINT OBJECT) (BLA BLA))

How about

(defmacro with-output-as-presentation1 ((&key stream type object) &body body)
   `(with-output-as-presentation (,stream ,type ,object) ,@body))


-- Frank Yellin
   fy@lucid.com