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Experience with an Uncommon Lisp (1986) [pdf]

• FALERCUAKZ 3y ago
  [flagged]
• FALERCUAKZ 3y ago
  [flagged]
• andsoitis 3y ago
  When our development process began, there was ferment in the Lisp community. One of the more important events relat- ing to the design of the new IBM Research Lisp system was the publication of the Bobrow and Wegbreit paper [Bobrow and Wegbreit 1973] proposing a new control structure, the spaghetti stack. We immediately seized on the elegance and flexibilityof this idea. A key component of this model of computation was the con- cept of the saved state, a data object which captured both the set of current variable bindings (the environment) and the current call chain and point of execution (the control). We have used saved states (state descriptors) extensively, both as a form of continuation and as a component of closures.
  • antonvs 3y ago
    > there was ferment in the Lisp community. This is the same as saying "the Lisp community existed."
    • lisper 3y ago
      No, it is saying that the community was coming up with a lot of remarkably good ideas.
      • jksmith 3y ago
        An elegant weapon for a more civilized age without the C language legacy.
        • fargle 3y ago
          that's like saying the 18th century was more "civilized" because we settled squabbles with dueling pistols. people are still people and we are just about as civilized today as we ever were. which isn't saying much. the analogy holds for programming languages as well as it does for anything else involving people.
          • jksmith 3y ago
            Just a fanciful quote with some license. But one might argue the defn of civilization as applied to general programming with so much of it being commodity programming these days. Additionally, I believe an argument could be made that the long-term tyranny of the C bubble has actually retarded the advancement of the art.
            • MonkeyClub 3y ago
              I think GP missed the reference, https://xkcd.com/297 https://xkcd.com/297
              • fargle 3y ago
                indeed. thank you.
      • antonvs 3y ago
        The point is that the Lisp community was always in some sort of ferment. The number of Lisps that were developed alone is testament to that.
  • digdugdirk 3y ago
    That sounds really interesting, in a way I cannot begin to comprehend. Can someone please translate into more common vernacular?
    • JimmyRuska 3y ago
      Sounds like an implementation for how to managing scopes using stack frames with some state machine like elements to it
    • volemo 3y ago
      > Can someone please translate into more common vernacular? If I were to read that, it’d be common lisp. :D
    • rurban 3y ago
      setjmp/longjmp if the states were not on the stack. (of course nobody would be so crazy to actually use longjmp, just properly save the stack state: env and control) if jumping back into inner states (i.e. out of control stacks), the stack frame needs to be preserved also. as in call/cc later.
  • ustad 3y ago
    Could not find the actual paper but the figures look cool: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-model-and-stack-implementation-of-multiple-Bobrow-Wegbreit/91a1b89eb1b286e6edd3aeba3562a9e195d6fb11 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-model-and-stack-impl...
    • mainland 3y ago
      Here is a copy of what looks to be the original report: <https://wellcomecollection.org/works/seuuc6a5 https://wellcomecollection.org/works/seuuc6a5> Here is a link to the version published with the ACM: <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362375.362379 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362375.362379>
  • _delirium 3y ago
    Is that kind of like a reified version of Scheme's call/cc?
• pmcjones 3y ago
  More on YKTLISP (and its predecessor) here: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/ibm_lisp_family/ https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/ibm_lisp_...
  • lispm 3y ago
    Looks like this was an application: YES/MVS https://cdn.aaai.org/AAAI/1984/AAAI84-032.pdf https://cdn.aaai.org/AAAI/1984/AAAI84-032.pdf About Lispedit: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1006142.1006164 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1006142.1006164
    • pmcjones 3y ago
      Thanks; I added citations for both of those.
      • lispm 3y ago
        "https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1006147.1006176 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1006147.1006176" "LEVEL LANGUAGE DEBUGGING WITH A COMPILER" -> about LispEdit
        • pmcjones 3y ago
          Thanks again; added that (and fixed up previous edit fat-fingering).
• pjmlp 3y ago
  Love the technical stuff on the paper related to compiler implementation, inline Assembly and debugging capabilities.