amszmidt

17 ms·

121.
by amszmidt 2y ago
Better just check the FSF status page ( https://mastodon.social/@fsfstatus@hostux.social ): We have a network outage at our primary data center, just about all the services we run are down. The problem is upstream of ou
122.
by amszmidt 2y ago
Cs ability to run on "unconventional" (though there is little unconventional about the Lisp Machine, it is a just a stack based machine) long predates C89 (specifically). ZETA-C, a C compiler specific to the Lisp Machine, was alre
123.
by amszmidt 2y ago
So ... GCC has had some of these for ages. Pascal lets you match a range of values with case low..high; wouldn't it be great if C had that feature? High C does, another feature standard C and C++ never adopted. https:/&
124.
by amszmidt 2y ago
> Good design would command a stricter separation of concerns/sub-systems (some LISP machine people will disagree, and I say it because there are a ton of them on HN, of course). The Lisp Machine did have a good and strict separatio
125.
by amszmidt 2y ago
The CADR had a convention for the A and M memory (essentially what we would call registers today) for the Lisp Machine microcode where the first 32 locations had special meaning. Location 2 was for constant 0, and 3 for constant -1.
126.
by amszmidt 2y ago
More like a relic of (actual) "spaghetti code", it was relatively common in really old Lisp code.
127.
by amszmidt 2y ago
It comes from Smalltalk. Flavors are probobly older than DEFCLASS, ZWEI and the Window system was already using Flavors heavily before DEFCLASS became part of the main system. Neither Flavors or DEFCLASS got replaced -- they have different
128.
by amszmidt 2y ago
Issue with the CADR (and Lambda ..) microcode isn't that it is hard to modify, it is that there is a very deep snake pit, and lots of complex interaction between the microcode and the Lisp Machine. The CADR already had support for (pre
129.
by amszmidt 2y ago
https://github.com/lisper/cpus-caddr #Lisp machine #gateware for the MIT CADR in modern #Verilog. “Boots and runs.” By #lisper (Brad Parker) It doesn't boot or work -- there are CDC issue and other
130.
by amszmidt 2y ago
Plenty don’t, e.g. BSDs. Bunch of embedded GNU/Linux systems. Etc.
131.
by amszmidt 2y ago
In what way do you consider smartphones constrained? They have more memory and processing power than a normal computer from 20 years back, even 10 years back.
132.
by amszmidt 2y ago
Lisp Machines had high resolution displays, loads of disk space, a language that was mostly type safe, with built in editor with capabilities that modern IDEs still often lack, email, etc ... Here is a pretty brochure for the LM-2 (a relabe
133.
by amszmidt 2y ago
> EDIT: OK, you explained what you call the normal way to do things. What kind of code is this that take >1 second in each repl? Out of curosity. One easy example -- listing all the files under the GNU Emacs tree to index them -- you
134.
by amszmidt 2y ago
> But why does that matter? Help me understand. It doesn't really. ZMacs and the Listener on the Lisp Machine is just as single threaded as GNU Emacs. One ZMacs frame cannot run the above code without locking up, one Listener instan
135.
by amszmidt 2y ago
ZMail on the Lisp Machine would stall the ZMail thread when fetching mail. So you wouldn't be able to compose an email if you'd be fetching 10MiB of mbox. But it isn't so much about tricks, sometimes it is nice if software j
136.
by amszmidt 2y ago
There is nothing special about CAR and CDR on the Lisp Machine, which should be considered a virtual machine for all intents and purposes that was implemented in microcode. Multi processing was implemented mostly in Lisp, but stack group ha
137.
by amszmidt 2y ago
> Compare with GNU Emacs, where Emacs Lisp lacks this feature. Wouldn't you want an mail thread not block the rest of Lisp code? Some Lisp action in the REPL not to block the rest of Lisp code? Emacs Lisp does have threads; https:&
138.
by amszmidt 2y ago
There is a bit to much simplification here, and confusing terminology going on here. Lisp Machines did not have "processes" (as in, Unix processes); a Lisp Machine process just a function - with some special properties. The Lisp
139.
by amszmidt 2y ago
Limited, and also wrong -- Tesler didn't invent any of those. They existed already by 1973 (supposed date of these inventions at Xerox PARC); e.g. TECO from MIT and E from Yale had functionality for cutting/pasting, replacing str
140.
by amszmidt 2y ago
That describes incremental compilation. Something Python is also capable of. Dynamic compilation (i.e. compilation during execution and/or modifying the emitted compiled output during run-time -- depending on which school one prefers)
141.
by amszmidt 2y ago
Your claim was that JIT was something CL had, it doesn't. But now your switching topics. The Lisp Machine compiler is incremental, but it is not a dynamic compiler, it never changes the compiled object when it has been compiled during
142.
by amszmidt 2y ago
Lisp's dynamic nature does not come from having or not having JIT; none of the implementations you mention had JIT. Compiling to native code isn't JIT, it was very common to run just straight interpreted code on the Lisp Machines
143.
by amszmidt 2y ago
Common Lisp doesn't specify anything about JIT.
144.
by amszmidt 2y ago
(indirect reference ITS and TENEX ... :-))
145.
by amszmidt 2y ago
> none of the GNU codebase was hosted in any sort of revision control. That isn't true, RCS was already in heavy use by 1991 in the GNU project.
146.
by amszmidt 2y ago
Most Lisp systems, be it Lisp Machines, or modern Common Lisp implementations do the same. The Lisp Machine didn't really have a kernel though, unless you call the microcode that implemented the Lisp Machine macrocode "engine&quo
147.
by amszmidt 2y ago
UUCP was definitely not "Unix only", several operating systems supported it back in the day, Lisp Machines and ITS could access UUCP over Chaosnet. Mark Plotnick wrote the service (aka deamon) for Chaosnet for Unix in 1984.
148.
by amszmidt 2y ago
Oh my! :-) Sure could help out .. pipe me an email. It isn't that hard to do, and doesn't modify the original in anyway.
149.
by amszmidt 2y ago
”man ascii” has as much guarantee to work on a POSIX system as a command called ”ascii” seeing neither (specifically a man page called ”ascii”) are part of the standard. So you will either get command not found, or man page not found.
150.
by amszmidt 2y ago
Genera is quite a bit larger than that, the rel-8-5 tree is 1.2 MLOC (though this includes other things, like Pascal, Fortran and a C compiler). But even if we take the MIT Lisp Machine system, which is smaller, it is still 450 KLOC. Just

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