HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: kardank@ERE.UMontreal.CA (Kardan Kaveh)
Subject: Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?
Organization: Universite de Montreal
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 17:59:35 GMT

In article <1993Jan27.070106.28425@ads.com> bvrotney@ADS.COM (Bill Vrotney) writes:
>
>In article <WELCH.93Jan26205611@sacral.cis.ohio-state.edu>
>welch@sacral.cis.ohio-state.edu (Arun Welch) writes:
>
>>   I think an associated question we should be asking is "How can we
>>   increase Lisp's popularity"? Knowing why it isn't popular is a good
>>   thing to discuss, but it would also be good to know where to go from
>>   [...]
>Yes "Where to go from here?" I am disappointed that the Lisp leadership is
>not addressing this question. This begs for something like the Common Lisp
>project but aimed at making Lisp smaller and faster in an organized way.  I
>[...]

Every once in a while this thread pops up, with people lamenting over the
size of Common Lisp.  Usually, someone (me, in this instance) will point out
that there is a small, standardized (IEEE) lisp around: Scheme.

I am crossposting this to comp.lang.scheme because I feel the point made above
applies to some extent to scheme as well.

Although the technical side of scheme has been very well handled, I find the
lack of scheme in the marketplace quite disturbing.  According to the FAQ,
there is only _one_ commercial implementation of scheme running on UNIX
workstations (Chez Scheme).

There are several free implementations around, but all are either toy
implementations or are concerned with being an "extestion language" for
applications written in C.  As a result they have no compilers and no
development environments.  Even MIT Scheme is not suited for serious,
production quality development (IMHO).  No foreign-function interface, for
one.

It can be argued that academia has done its job in presenting us with
extremely elegant standards (R4RS and IEEE), but the commercial sector has
dropped the ball.  Why, for example, do none of the CL vendors also have
scheme systems for sale?

Do we have to wait around for Dylan to appear?  Scheme offers, to a large
extent, what Dylan promises at some uncertain time in the future.

Kaveh




-- 
------------
Kaveh Kardan                                       kaveh@taarna.UUCP
Systeme Taarna                                     kardank@eole.umontreal.qc.ca
Montreal Quebec Canada                             (514)844-8448
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: jmm@contra-aid.lucid.com (Jay Mellman)
Subject: Any Common Lisp under Solaris 2.1
Organization: Lucid, Inc.
Distribution: comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.clos
Date: 26 Jan 93 15:59:49


As everyone should be well aware, the change from SunOS to Solaris is
a major change requiring a large rewriting of underlying systems to
make Common Lisp run.  The good news is that Lucid has just shipped a
beta version of Lucid Common Lisp for Solaris 2.1 to a number of our
test sites.  As our QA manager said, "this is the strongest piece of
software I have seen."  I expect beta to go very smoothly.  In
general, you can expect formal release of the software in 3 months.

Please contact me or "sales@lucid.com" for more information.

Jay Mellman				jmm@lucid.com
Product Marketing Manager		(415) 329-8400
Lucid, Inc.
From: Espen J. Vestre <espen@coli.uni-sb.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Lisp syntax beauty? (was Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?)
Date: 27 Jan 1993 16:23:05 GMT
Organization: Computerlinguistik, Universitaet des Saarlandes
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: mp-mac10.coli.uni-sb.de
X-UserAgent: Nuntius v1.1.1d12
X-XXMessage-ID: <A78C7596B8014453@mp-mac10.coli.uni-sb.de>
X-XXDate: Wed, 27 Jan 93 16:23:34 GMT

In article <8268@skye.ed.ac.uk> Jeff Dalton, jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk writes:
>should it be fatal.  What if, for instance, CL is packaged as
>a shared library (as in WCL)?  It's a fairly big shared library,
>but then so is X.

...on Decstations X isn't even a shared library, which makes xclock half
a megabyte big :-)

(forgive me, decfriends, if things are better now than the last time I
used a Decstation!)

--------------------------------------------------------------
Espen J. Vestre,                          espen@coli.uni-sb.de
Universitaet des Saarlandes,        
Computerlinguistik, Gebaeude 17.2 
Im Stadtwald,                          tel. +49 (681) 302 4501
D-6600 SAARBRUECKEN, Germany           fax. +49 (681) 302 4351
--------------------------------------------------------------
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Lisp syntax beauty? (was Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?)
Date: 26 Jan 93 19:24:11 GMT
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

In article <C1AsFo.G2p@dei.unipd.it> gandalf@sabrina.dei.unipd.it (ROBERTO AVANZI) writes:

>My 2 cents about "Why is not lisp a mainstream language" are as follow.
>i)   people think lisp <=> AI . it's false we know, but most people think so.
>     a friend of mine (and and intelligent person) asked me: why do you
>     use Lisp, AI has failed in its objectives...

I can understand this reason, but I'm not sure what it's really
about.  In what way has AI failed, in this view?  What did these
people think AI was trying to do?  Over-hyped, sure, but what was
the _failure_?

>ii)  people hate parentheses. But still I do not understand why do they not
>     use forth instead then ...

It's true that many people dislike Lisp syntax.  But some people who
dislike it can grow to like it once they see how it "works".  It isn't
necessary to pay attention to individual parens when reading
well-indented code, and the editor should take care of the problem
when writing.  People who aren't used to well-indented Lisp don't
know the conventions and so can't see what's going on w/o being
distracted by the parens.

>iii) Lisp has been since recent times a resource hog. now its a false
>     statement, we have light lisps. but when allegro on a sparc gives you
>     a 11meg image, well, I believe something is wrong with allegro...

Something is wrong with a lot of Lisps.  I know people who like Lisp
but who don't want to use it because their programs are so much bigger
and slower than if they use C.  This is for windows-and-graphics sorts
of things.  Lisp started with a huge lead in this area and threw it
away.

>iv)  a lack to a good interface to C routines. NOT OS interface, but generic
>     C code. I mean a STANDARD way. CMUCL, Lucid, Allegro all offer such
>     facilities but they are incompatible. That's bad.

I agree.

-- jeff
From: dfs@doe.carleton.ca (David F. Skoll)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Lisp syntax beauty? (was Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?)
Date: 25 Jan 93 17:06:25 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Electronics, Carleton University

In <KRULWICH.93Jan25102251@zowie.ils.nwu.edu>
krulwich@zowie.ils.nwu.edu (Bruce Krulwich) writes:


>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).

I think the paragraph above sums up nicely why Lisp is not a
mainstream language.  Having to "think" of it as something else is not
something most programmers want to do.  They want a language that's
portable, small, standard and cheap.  Common Lisp programs are (in
theory) quite portable, but in practice are no more portable than C
programs.  Common Lisp is not small, so it's not that good for small
applications.  And Lisp is not cheap - if you want to distribute Lisp
applications, you usually have to pay $$$ to the Lisp vendor to
distribute Lisp run-time licenses.  Also, the good Common Lisp
compilers are not free - are quite expensive, in fact.  Compare this
to C, for example, which has no run-time royalties, and has a free
ANSI-standard compiler.

Another problem is that Lisp enthusiasts are not that good at
marketing Lisp. :-) When you tell people "well, think of this as..."
they switch off.  :-)

--
David F. Skoll
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: jssloka@monet.uwaterloo.ca (Scott Sloka)
Subject: Implementation of ABSTRIPS or others?
Keywords: abstraction
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 22:28:31 GMT


Howdy.  My name is Scott Sloka and I am a graduate student at the University
of Waterloo.  I am doing a project on the use of abstraction and abstraction
space hierarchies and I wish to implement this on our own system.  Is there
a copy of the code used for other abstraction type programs out there (such as
ABSTRIPS, ABTWEAK, something with GPS...) that would give me a general idea of
how to implement this.  I would probably be implementing this in LISP.  If I
could find an implementation for another program it may mean speeding up the
implementation process on our own and using this to implement some interesting
problems (have I used the word implement enough?...).  Any help or guidance
would be much appreciated, either in literature reference or in the form of
code via FTP.  Many thanks in advance.

				-Scott

From: kers@hplb.hpl.hp.com (Chris Dollin)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 10:22:44 GMT
Subject: Re: Lisp vs English (was Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?)
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp

Michael.Fleming@f2206.n124.z1.fidonet.org (Michael Fleming) writes:

   Don't most languages use prefix notation? For example puts("type 
   your name."); seems quite similar to (print "type your name"). Why 
   is one prefix and the other something else? Prefix notation is also 
   common in English. We say "Put the letter in the slot" not "letter 
   put slot." Or "the letter put in the slot". I am puzzled by the 
   complaint that a drawback of Lisp is its use of prefix notation.
   I agree that a complex math expression can be difficult in prefix, 
   but the same expression is usually difficult in infix as well.
    * Origin: The Interocitor*AI/Robotics*214-258-1832 (1:124/2206)

(a) Imperatives in English are prefix, but declarative sentences are 
infix (degnerating to postfix when there's no second argument); ``I 
drink tea'', ``She abhores jazz'', ``This is an aardvark'', ``I swim''.

(b) In any case, ``infix'' is rather a weak term, sicne many 
(programming) language structures ae mixfix; if-then-else-(endif),
while-do-(endwhile), etc, as well as providing infix operators.

(c) Infix operators are not confined to the usual mathematical ones; 
consulting a piece of code I've just de-iconised, I see the following
infixes:

	.		x.f, evaluate x and apply f to it
	->>		val ->> var, assign and preserve value
	->		val -> var, assign, don't preserve value
	==		x == y, x is-identical-to y (test)
	/==		x /== y, x isn't the same thing as y
	::		x :: y, list with head x and tail y
	>		x > y, numeric greater-than
	-		x - y, numeric subtraction
	+		x + y, numeric addition
	><		x >< y, turn into strings and concatenate

*I* find ``x == y'' easier to read than ``(== x y)'' or ``(eq x y)'',
and at this point Your Kilometerage May Vary.


--

Regards | "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be
Kers.   | a violent psychopath who knows where you live." - John F. Woods
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: basile@soleil.serma.cea.fr (Basile STARYNKEVITCH)
Subject: Re: Any Common Lisp under Solaris 2.1?
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 13:25:48 GMT
Reply-To: basile@soleil.serma.cea.fr
Organization: Commissariat a l Energie Atomique, France

In article 13048@cscs.ch, dvorak@cscs.ch (Jiri Dvorak) writes:
>
[.....]
> How about the 
>binary compatibility mode of Solaris? Will Lisp interpreters, e.g. Allegro 
>or Lucid, run under this mode?

I didn't manage to run Sun Common Lisp (ie Lucid Common Lisp) 4.0.0 under Solaris.
The obvious reason for that is that a lisp image does not use shared libraries
(which are needed by Solaris' BCP) and haven't a sylmbol-table readable by the
system utilities (ld, nm... --- of course they have internal symbol tables with a
proprietary format).

Rumors says than Lucid CL will be ported to Solmaris at 2nd half of 1993.


---
Basile STARYNKEVITCH
Commissariat a l Energie Atomique
DRN/DMT/SERMA * C.E. Saclay bat.470 * 91191 GIF/YVETTE CEDEX * France
fax: (33) 1- 69.08.23.81;    phone: (33) 1- 69.08.40.66
email: basile@soleil.serma.cea.fr;  homephone: (33) 1- 46.65.45.53

C.E.A. is a French Government owned research & development organization
(about 16,000 people and 16 Billion French Francs annual budget - 1US$ is about 6FF)
on nuclear physics, reactors, biology, and weapons.

N.B. Any opinions expressed here are solely mine, and not of my organization.
N.B. Les opinions exprimees ici me sont personnelles et n engagent pas le CEA.

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 02:45:57 GMT

In <EMCOOP.93Jan22161006@bcars148.bnr.ca> emcoop@bnr.ca (hume smith) writes:

>hmm...  what makes a general purpose language?  does providing lots of special
>functions have anything to with it?

Providing lots of special-purpose functions which cannot be removed at
run-time is bad news.  I have no problems with lots of special-purpose
functions, but you shouldn't be forced to have them all, whether you
need them or not.  The CL standard makes no provisions for excluding
some functions from a run-time environment.  I'd bet that most
CL implementations can't be made much smaller than their full
(bloated) size.

>i think you can turn the argument around (classic usenet fashion) and say
>that functions that only print numbers in digits is pretty special purpose
>too.  especially, functions that read and write floating point in base ten
>only (my personal beef - there's no reason it can't be done in other bases!).

There's a difference - how many programs have you written which
require numbers to be printed in base 10?  In English?  We're not
talking philosophical abstractions here - we're talking real-world
use.

>i think it's a nice little bonus feature.  when do you ever use most of the
>functions in the UNIX C libraries?  isn't it handy the one time in a hundred
>you need them - you can keep on truckin' instead of trying to figure out how
>to patch around the hole?

Absolutely.  But if you don't want to use a certain C function, you don't
link it in.  Your programs have no overhead for unused functionality.
If Common Lisp had some mechanism for this, then my criticism would not
be valid.

--
David F. Skoll
From: bill@cambridge.apple.com (Bill St. Clair)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp.mcl
Subject: Re: Doing "replace" in Fred
Date: 21 Jan 93 19:47:05 GMT

At  4:48 1/21/93 +0000, John Kim wrote:
>joungwoo@mensa.usc.edu (John Kim) writes:
>
>>I'm using MCL-2.0f and like Fred because it works almost as Emacs. But to my
>>surprise, there doesn't seem to be a way to replace (change) one string to
>>another, the feature which comes very handy in a programing environment. Am I
>>missing something?
>
>>Please email me.
>
>>Thanks,
>
>>John
>
>OK. I got it. (shame on me.) It was there in the Edit menu under SEARCH
>(command-F). My absentminded mistake was in trying to do it in EMACS fashion
>(looking for an extended, Meta-x, command.)
>
>Thank you for all your help.

You might also try "ccl:examples;query-replace.lisp". It's a little
more like the normal EMACS replace & query-replace commands.
From: drh@world.std.com (Denis R Howlett)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp.mcl
Subject: Re: Simulating selections
Date: 25 Jan 93 17:21:21 GMT

Thanks to those who replied to my question about getting the selection
color so that I could simulate selections for my static text dialog items.

I haven't had a chance to try all the possibilities yet, but those that I 
tried worked, and I'll try the others this afternoon.

One thing I did notice was in Oodles of Utils, when I tried the draggable 
items, the first one I selected would go red, but when I dropped it on
something else it went black and my selection color for all Mac applications
would be set back to black (I'd have to go into the Color control panel to
reset it)! This seemed a bit odd but may have been something to do with the
fact that I couldn't get the method ccl:call-with-focused-view in 
GWorld-view.lisp to compile (it said it wasn't a generic method) so I just
commented it out!

Again thanks to everyone on this mailing list. We have more or less completed
a port of our Product Formulation Expert System (PFES) from the PC (Golden
Common Lisp) to MCL. The Mac version runs about the same speed on a IIci with
8Megs memory as a 386 33 MHz with 12 Megs (DOS version) and the user interface
is much, much better.

Since I am the only one in the Company in the US who has any experience with
MCL (or Lisp?) I couldn't have done it without you!

Denis

P.S. Anybody interested in a shell for supporting Formulators? We have
applications mainly in tablet formulation, but also paint, sun tan lotion,
lubrication oils, food & drink etc. (Sorry for the nasty commercialism, but
I proud of what I've built!)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Denis Howlett                                 | Phone: +617 890 7730
Logica North America Inc.                     | Fax:   +617 890 5034
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: RPHDYKST@idbsu.idbsu.edu (Dewey Dykstra)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp.mcl
Subject: Using save-application
Date: 22 Jan 93 18:09:16 GMT

We are developing some software using MCL 2.0.  Recently I was able to do a
save-application on a PowerBook 180 using the following

(save-application "pathname" :size 8192)

It took about 2.5 mins to complete its task and would reload and be ready to
run in about 20 sec.  (Powerbook had virtual memory running with sufficient
allocation for this.)

I was on the road at the time and did the above to make a presentation.  When I
got home I tried the same thing on a Quadra 950, but I keep getting an error of
type -605 when I try to run the application which has been saved.  I have tried
both Cache settings on the Quadra, made sure that the :size for the saved appli
cation matches that of the lisp which created the application, made sure that
no other applications were loaded before lisp when I made the application or
when I tried to open the saved application.  It seems to have no problems
saving the application, its just that something about the saved application
is bad.

How can I get this to work on the Quadra 950??  Will I have similar problems
on a Quadra 700 or a IIci?  Please send any helpful comments to me at my
address above as I am not a regular on info-mcl.

Second question:  We find that it takes a long time for our system to compile.
In particular we have two parts which are 200 - 300 K which contain functions
that are created.  Is there anything we can do to speed up the compiling pro-
cess?  Again, please send any helpful comments to my e-mail address above.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Dewey Dykstra
From: UK0392@AppleLink.Apple.COM (EHN & DIJ Oakley,GB,IDV)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp.mcl
Subject: Rocket problems
Date: 27 Jan 93 21:32:00 GMT

Friends,
 
After my recent claims of success in running MCL 2 on a Radius Rocket, I must
now qualify that:
 
I can run MCL 2.0p2 very happily on a Radius Rocket, in a IIci, *provided* that
the Rocket does not use interleaved memory.  My previous experiences in using a
Rocket were with a 20 Mbyte board (16 + 4 Mbyte), which the Rocket accesses
normally.  However, in order to improve its speed, the Rocket will endeavour to
interleave its memory access when the SIMMs in its two banks contain SIMMs of
the same size.  Today, I upgraded to 32 Mbyte (16 + 16) and lo and behold, MCL
2.0p2 would not run under any conditions.
 
There is currently no way to turn interleaving off, therefore I had to return
to the previous 20 Mbyte configuration in order to be able to run MCL.
 
I am filing full bug reports with bug-mcl and Radius in the hope that a happy
coexistence is reached!
 
Howard.
From: bill@cambridge.apple.com (Bill St. Clair)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp.mcl
Subject: Re: how to change stack size?
Date: 22 Jan 93 23:14:27 GMT

>Could you tell me how to change stack size of mcl2?
> 
>Looks like I have to do it, since I am now calculating integers
>as big as (expt 10 300000).

Are you really running out of stack, or are you running out of
heap? (expt 10 300000) requires about 

Stack overflow reports "Stack Overflow":

? (defun foo (x)
    (foo x)
    nil)
FOO
? (foo 1)
> Error: Stack overflow.
> While executing: FOO
> Type Command-. to abort.
See the Restarts  menu item for further choices.
1 > 

Out of heap reports "Memory allocation request failed":

? (make-array (Expt 2 24))
> Error: Memory allocation request failed.
> While executing: %MAKE-UVECTOR
> Type Command-. to abort.
See the Restarts  menu item for further choices.
1 > 

If you're running out of heap, you can increase the size of MCL's partition
by using the "Get Info" command on the Finder's "File" menu, or by
specifying a :SIZE option to SAVE-APPLICATION.

If you're running out of stack, you can change MCL's LSIZ resource to
allocate more stack either with ResEdit or with the :MEMORY-OPTIONS
option to SAVE-APPLICATION. See the MCL 2.0 Release Notes for details
on the :MEMORY-OPTIONS keyword.