30 Oct
2011
30 Oct
'11
8:59 a.m.
On 29 October 2011 03:15, Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> wrote:
From: Liam Proven
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2011 3:18 PM
On 26 October 2011 13:40, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
I've done a little Googling and from the few scant mentions I can
find, I can't, TBH, see much different myself, as an outsider looking
in. I understand the namespace distinction (I think) but the syntax
looks nigh-identical from the few snippets I found.
> Last night I came across (via Quora*) a piece
by Paul Graham that tries to
> put McCarthy's early Lisp work into perspective.
> http://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html
> (The article itself is linked here as a PostScript file.)
> I haven't read it all yet.
Nice article - thanks for that!
I'll second that. ?Very nice precis.
The more I read about Lisp, the more I want to
understand... but I
suspect I am too old & even in my youth I never got much past BASIC.
The only Lisp I've been able to follow code in is Dylan, and Dylan
seems to be rather moribund... :?(
JMC actually used what he called Lisp 2 in his classes, an algebraic
notation not unlike Dylan, very Algol-like in flavor. ?Not surprising,
when you think of the relative ages of Lisp and Algol. There are some very good books on Lisp. ?There is one
introductory book
on the language which is a lot of fun, _Land of Lisp_ by Barski, in which
you learn the language by writing programs like Grand Theft Wumpus (in a
chapter entitled "This Ain't Your Daddy's Wumpus"). ?It's enough to
get
anyone started in Common Lisp. ?(I prefer CL's ball-of-mud to Scheme's
diamond, to steal the Lisp-is-a-ball-of-mud-APL-is-a-diamond trope from
Joel Moses.)
I still prefer the first edition of Winston and Horn's _LISP_, which
covers several dialects at once, especially MACLISP and InterLISP, but
it's dated, so go with the 2nd or 3rd instead. ?Wade Hennessey's _Common
Lisp_ is pretty good, too. ?These are all from the early days of CL,
before it got as big as Ubuntu or RedHat.
Noted. Ta!
The way I *really* learned Lisp was by looking at toy
implementations,
especially one written in Pascal. ?That was back in the early or mid 1980s,
way before the Web, so I don't remember where it was published. ?I read the
paper in the Math library @ Stanford (which no longer has a lot of the old
working papers collection on paper, just on fiche where it's a lot harder
to browse). ?If you like, I can send you the source to my variant, or make
it publicly readable on the Toad-1 at the museum.
Hmmm. Interesting. I wonder if I can remember enough BBC BASIC to
implement a very crude Lisp in it. :?D
If you get access JMC's 1960 paper in ACM, read
it. ?The APPLY function
which Paul Graham skips in his precis is a wonder in itself, and is the
reason that LISP 1.5 and InterLISP are "evalquote" while PDP-1 LISP,
MACLISP, CL & Scheme are "eval": ?The evaluation loop in the former goes
? ? ? ?(print (apply (read) (read)))
vs. ? ? (print (eval (read)))
Enough for this evening.
Many thanks! Lots of food for further reading there.
May I ask: what do folk think of the quote I've often seen cited:
* Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.
* Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: "the car that's always in front of
you."
* Common Lisp is Howl's Moving Castle.
--
Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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