johncowan

5 ms·

1.
by johncowan 3y ago
That raises a more general point. When you can't or don't have compile-time checks, removing run-time checks in production amounts to wearing your seat belt only when driving around a parking lot and then unbuckling when you get
2.
by johncowan 3y ago
> there is no guarantee that [syscall stability] will last forever even in Linux given the latest attacks That's true, but what of it? Linus won't last forever, Linux won't last forever, computers won't last forever,
3.
by johncowan 3y ago
I remember the first time I heard of someone being fired for buying IBM, a thing that many people thought would never happen.
4.
by johncowan 3y ago
Not the case. Anyway, it's not about being quarrelsome, it's about having a different point of view. As for compromise, it's hard to compromise between strictness vs. laxness, for example. Child A: I want the whole pie! Chi
5.
by johncowan 3y ago
Not if it's so constraining to the implementer that you can't get any implementations. Nobody's paying us to do this stuff.
6.
by johncowan 3y ago
Damn, my emoji got eaten. See https://emojipedia.org/chair .
7.
by johncowan 3y ago
Sorry, not sorry. Here's one for you: .
8.
by johncowan 3y ago
We have had four models: Committee consensus took us up through R5RS. There were about 30 members of the committee, though obviously some were more active than others. The problem with that was that we got no change except at the margins.
9.
by johncowan 3y ago
Alas, no. There are quite a few other things that are needed in what is now being called the Foundations in order for adding features to be done through libraries. Scheme, like other Lisps, is almost all "library" and very littl
10.
by johncowan 3y ago
Racket is not an extension of Chez; Chez is an implementation language for Racket (it replaces most of the C code in earlier versions). See my comment above about implementation languages. The main benefit of basing Racket on Chez instea
11.
by johncowan 3y ago
Or more simply https://github.com/johnwcowan/r7rs-spec/tree/errata/rnrs , where you can get Every Scheme Standard Evar. It's unsurprising that there is no one place for R7RS-large, considering how i
12.
by johncowan 3y ago
The issue is that lots of languages don't make complex numbers part of what Lispers call the numeric tower, fully integrated into numeric operations, even if there is a complex library. Here's Guy Steele's 3-part smoke test
13.
by johncowan 3y ago
For "precisely" read "correctly". Unless the implementation language is exposed to users of the implemented language, it doesn't matter what the implementation language is. gfortran is written in C and C++, but th
14.
by johncowan 3y ago
Which of course cannot be done portably except by drastic restrictions like "never add a number greater than MAXINT / 2 and never multiply a number greater than sqrt(MAXINT)".
15.
by johncowan 3y ago
Racket is far and away the most popular Scheme (and I reject the claim that it is not Scheme).
16.
by johncowan 3y ago
Very well said. A fourth group is people maintaining existing user code (including libraries), who also want backward compatibility.
17.
by johncowan 3y ago
Lisp is 65 years old and its future will be longer than its past! Another way to look at a fast-moving industry is that it's all hype and flutter with the occasional solid achievement.
18.
by johncowan 3y ago
If you really want to undo the Cambrian explosion, you will get Fortran and Lisp. A better SQL, Prolog, and something like Haskell might also be useful/necessary.
19.
by johncowan 3y ago
On the other hand, a theorem prover written by John McCarthy in 1958 was trivially adaptable to both Common Lisp and Scheme. Not too many languages get to make that claim.
20.
by johncowan 3y ago
If you mean me, I am definitely not a human sacrifice. I walked away because I had had enough.
21.
by johncowan 3y ago
I'm the ex(1) troglodyte in question. I don't use custom aliases, because I have had all editing tasks hardwired into my brain for decades, ever since I dropped Teco for ed and then ex. (Ed is the standard editor, but I'm w
22.
by johncowan 5y ago
Memory is a finite resource too, but would you force your students to run all their programs in 12K of memory, just because that was how much memory I had in the machine I learned to program on in 1972?
23.
by johncowan 5y ago
SQL is no/low-code compared to using a low-level database like BDB for a given level of power. And yet it's much simpler for most use cases. By the same token, C is low-code compared to assembler, Python is low-code compared to C
24.
by johncowan 5y ago
There's a tradition of skullduggery-related names: Guile, Gambit, Gauche, Heist, Larceny (with variants Petit Larceny and Common Larceny), Racket, and Stalin (it optimizes your code -- brutally). "Chicken" is I believe relat
25.
by johncowan 5y ago
Developed by Kent Dybvig, sold to Chez which did who-knows-what with it (hiring Dybvig as well) but never commercialized it directly, and then open-sourced by Cisco.
26.
by johncowan 5y ago
Chicken supports fx+ and flround as well, as do all R6RS and R7RS-large systems.
27.
by johncowan 5y ago
We usually write RnRS. If you're into Unicode or markup languages like TeX and HTML, you can write R⁴RS, R⁵RS, R⁶RS, R⁷RS, or generally RⁿRS. And yes, I think that "The Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Repo
28.
by johncowan 5y ago
A few notes: 1) R6RS isn't really all that "batteries included", though it has some really basic features like hash tables that weren't in R5RS (but were in most Schemes anyway). The emphasis was on portability and safe
29.
by johncowan 5y ago
In fact, your strategy can forward your goals with no causal connection to what you want to change, either by sheer luck, or because your rhetoric inspires people to do the Right Thing by some completely different means. But I agree, of cou
30.
by johncowan 5y ago
You might want to look at MicroXML < https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/microxml/raw-file/tip/spec/microxml.h... > then. No XML declaration, no DTDs, no PIs, no CDATA sections, no cruft.

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