3 ms·
I hadn’t realised that Danny Bobrow and Alice Hartley invented the spaghetti stack — I’d thought it was RMS a couple of years later. There was a bug in the spa
by gumby 3y ago
I hadn’t realised that Danny Bobrow and Alice Hartley invented the spaghetti stack — I’d thought it was RMS a couple of years later.
There was a bug in the spaghetti stack code in Interlisp D which I triggered at PARC in mid 1984 (basically it spaghettied the stack every time you made a closure. I spawned hundreds…which brought things to a crawl. JonL eventually fixed it.
On DWIM: Interlisp used it to do macro expansion so you could not disable it.
- kragen 3y agohave you tried the recent revival of interlisp and medley? i'm interested to hear what you think
- gumby 3y agoThose days are in my past. Also though medley had some good ideas I preferred the MIT-style machines and commonlisp. I will say that in general PARC’s cloud services of the late 70s/mid 80s were still superior to what we have access to today. Another case of “worse is better”. Sadly it feels today that people think that means “worse is preferred”. It’s like all the people who know the title “Goto considered harmful” but never read the paper, so grossly misunderstand it.
- amszmidt 3y agoMaybe you are thinking of Phantom Stacks[1]. Spaghetti stacks where created by Bobrow and Wegbreit in 1972. [1]: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6331 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6331
- gumby 3y agoAh yes, that’s surely what I am conflating! I didn’t think the phantom stack idea was that great (but it was just an idea worthy of a working paper, so no big deal). Also I really don’t think spaghetti stacks were so great in retrospect, especially when implemented on modern architectures that lack the lightweight stack support of the PDP-10 which probably inspired the design.