lapsed_lisper

6 ms·

1.
by lapsed_lisper 5mo ago
I've worked on projects with people who've insisted on these approaches, and I've never understood how this secures things in any deep way. As I understand the reasoning, open("/a/b",...) is discouraged in
2.
by lapsed_lisper 8mo ago
A while ago I stumbled across a technique for improving stream buffering that I wish more I/O library implementors knew about. Korn and Vo's sfio library (circa 1991) had a feature called "pooling", whereby distinct stre
3.
by lapsed_lisper 11mo ago
Re: obtaining a legal copy of Genera, as of 2023 Symbolics still existed as a corporate entity and they continued to sell x86-64 laptops with "Portable Genera 2.0". I bought one from them then, and occasionally see them listing so
4.
by lapsed_lisper 1y ago
I don't know about the Unix certification process itself, but the Single Unix Specification explicitly mentions case-insensitivity among non-conforming file system behaviors that are allowed as extensions (in 2.1.1 item 4, third-to-las
5.
by lapsed_lisper 1y ago
And then, since the type NIL is a subtype of all types, it's a subtype of CHARACTER. So because the type STRING is the union of all array types whose element type is a subtype of CHARACTER, an array that can't store any values is
6.
by lapsed_lisper 1y ago
Yes, in Common Lisp, NIL is a value (it's a symbol, and by convention also the empty list). But when used as a type specifier, NIL denotes the empty set. So no Lisp object is of that type, and an array with that element type cannot sto
7.
by lapsed_lisper 1y ago
I worked in Perl for ~2.5 years in the mid-2000s. It wasn't the language for me, but I liked, respected, and am still friends with colleagues who loved it. However, I was always dumbfounded by the experience that none of them could or
8.
by lapsed_lisper 1y ago
IDK how much this matters, but the Common Lisp standard doesn't mandate tail call elimination. So although many implementations offer it (usually as a compiler thing), it's conceptually an implementation-dependent detail that bord
9.
by lapsed_lisper 1y ago
I used to think this, but now mostly (but weakly) don't. Long options buy expressiveness at the cost of density, i.e., they tend to turn "one-liners" into "N-liners". One-liners can be cryptic, but N-liners reduce h
10.
by lapsed_lisper 2y ago
Among conceptually Unix-like OSes, at least one tried to do something along these lines: see http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/SR10/011021-A00_Using_Yo... PDF pp 151 and following.
11.
by lapsed_lisper 2y ago
Unix's standard error is definitely not the first invention of a sink for errors. According to Doug McIlroy, Unix got standard error in its 6th Edition, released in May 1975 ( http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reade
12.
by lapsed_lisper 3y ago
S-expressions only really address a smallish part of what people seem to want out of configuration file syntaxes: a simple, recursive syntax. Among the things that S-expressions don't address per se are the interpretation of tokens (e.
13.
by lapsed_lisper 3y ago
ISTM one could use the same premises to reach the opposite conclusion, namely, that because awk is basically a subset of Perl (excluding CPAN, of course), many things are easier to read, often resulting in more regular, if sometimes longer
14.
by lapsed_lisper 4y ago
Right, good questions. Pure conjecture on my part: maybe it's just that 36 is the smallest integral multiple of 6 that also had enough bits to represent integers of the desired width?
15.
by lapsed_lisper 4y ago
If you're keen to go down the wikipedia hole, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code and then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCD_(character_encoding) explain that IBM created a 6
16.
by lapsed_lisper 4y ago
Does it really make that much difference if comments exist "inside" the embedded sublanguage vs. "outside"? After all, you can always construct a format specification by string concatenation, and in CL, you can trick the
17.
by lapsed_lisper 4y ago
Out of curiosity, how often do you find yourself using CL-PPCRE's S-expression notation? (This is a genuine question: I've never felt a desire for an S-expression notation for regular expressions, so I'm curious what I'm
18.
by lapsed_lisper 4y ago
Richard P. Gabriel (one of the co-creators of Common Lisp, later a founder of the Lisp vendor, Lucid) has a few interesting things to say about CL's FORMAT in his Patterns Of Software, starting on page 101: https://www.dream
19.
by lapsed_lisper 5y ago
IMO, the bad parts Unix are of two semi-distinct kinds: the skin-deep kind, and the genetic defects. The superficial problems are everywhere, easy to spot, and fun to complain about! The names of commands are obscure, the flags are inconsis