Hi Carl
Yes, I have always felt that you got nowhere near the coverage and recognition
you deserved for PLANNER (the whole enchilada) -- to me it was a real landmark
of a set of very powerful insights and perspectives. Definitely one of the very
top gems of the late 60s!
I recall there was lots of good wine at that Pajaro Dunes meeting! (And Jeff
Rulifson helped me pull off that Beef Wellington with the three "must have"
sauces). That was also a great group. Cordell Green was there, Richard
Waldinger, Rulifson, (Bob Yates?), Bob Balzer, etc. Can you remember any of the
others? That one must have been in 1970.
And it was indeed the "second -- and sequential -- evaluator" (from the Lisp
1.5 manual) that I had in mind when I did the ST-72 eval. Another influence on
that scheme was the tiny Meta II parser-compiler that Val Shorre did at UCLA in
1963 (for an 8K byte 1401!). I loved that little system. This led to the ST-72
"eval" really being a kind of cascaded "apply" ...
And there's no question that once
you aim at "real objects" a distributed "eval" makes great sense.
Cheers,
Alan
>________________________________
> From: Carl Hewitt <hew...@concurrency.biz>
>To: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>
>Cc: Programming Language Design <pi...@googlegroups.com>; Dale Schumacher
><dale.schumac...@gmail.com>; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
>Group <fr...@redfish.com>; "computational-actors-gu...@googlegroups.com"
><computational-actors-gu...@googlegroups.com>; Fundamentals of New Computing
><fonc@vpri.org>
>Sent: Saturday, November 26, 2011 9:24 AM
>Subject: RE: [CAG] Re: [fonc] Fexpr the Ultimate Lambda
>
>
>Hi Alan,
>
>Yes, Smalltalk-71 had lots of potential! Unfortunately, the way it developed
>was that Kowalski picked up a subset of micro-Planner (backward chaining only
>along with backtracking only control structure) and PROLOG was made into
>something of an ideology. I have published a history in ArXiv titled “Middle
>History of Logic Programming: Resolution, Planner, Edinburgh LCF, Prolog, and
>the Japanese Fifth Generation Project” at
>http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.3036
>
>I have fond memories of the Beef Wellington that you prepared at one of the
>Pajaro Dunes meetings of the “DARPA Junior Over-achievers” society! Before
>McCarthy developed his meta-circular definition, the developers of Lisp 1 took
>a similar approach to yours by developing a looped sequential program that
>mimicked their assembly language implementation.
>
>Using “eval” as a message instead of the Lisp procedure is an interesting way
>to do language extension. For example lambda notation could be added to
>ActorScript as follows:
>
>
><<<”lambda” “(“ id|->Identifier “)” body|->Expression>>> ~~ eval(env) -->
>(argument) --> body.eval(Environment(id,argument, env))
>
> where
>
> Environment(iden, value, enviro) ~~ lookup(iden2) -->
>iden2=iden ?~ true --> value ?? false --> enviro.lookup(iden2) ~?
>
>Cheers,
>Carl
>
>From:Alan Kay [mailto:alan.n...@yahoo.com]
>Sent: Friday, November 25, 2011 15:37
>To: Carl Hewitt; Dale Schumacher
>Cc: Programming Language Design; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
>Group; computational-actors-gu...@googlegroups.com; Fundamentals of New
>Computing
>Subject: Re: [CAG] Re: [fonc] Fexpr the Ultimate Lambda
>
>Hi Carl
>
>I've always wished that we had gotten around to doing Smalltalk-71 -- which in
>many ways was a more interesting approach because it was heavily influenced by
>Planner -- kind of a "Planner Logo" with objects -- it was more aimed at the
>child users we were thinking about. ST-72 did the job at a more primitive
>level.
>
>P.S. The characterizations of ST-71 and ST-72 in your paper are not quite
>accurate -- but this doesn't matter -- but it is certainly true that we did
>not put concurrency in at the lowest level, nor did we have a truly formal
>model (I wrote the first interpreter scheme using a McCarthy-like approach --
>it was a short one-pager -- but I wrote it as a looped sequential program
>rather than metacircularly because I wanted to show how it could be
>implemented).
>
>Cheers,
>
>Alan
>
>
>>
>>________________________________
>>
>>From:Carl Hewitt <hew...@concurrency.biz>
>>To: Dale Schumacher <dale.schumac...@gmail.com>
>>Cc: Programming Language Design <pi...@googlegroups.com>; The Friday Morning
>>Applied Complexity Coffee Group <fr...@redfish.com>;
>>"computational-actors-gu...@googlegroups.com"
>><computational-actors-gu...@googlegroups.com>; Alan Kay
>><alan.n...@yahoo.com>; Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>
>>Sent: Friday, November 25, 2011 12:11 PM
>>Subject: RE: [CAG] Re: [fonc] Fexpr the Ultimate Lambda
>>I have started a discussion topic on Lambda the Ultimate so that others can
>>participate here: Actors all the way down
>>
>>How SmallTalk-72 influenced the development of Actors is discussed in Actor
>>Model of Computation: Scalable Robust Information Systems.
>>
>>Cheers,
>>Carl
>>
>>PS. Kristen Nygaard and I had some fascinating late night discussions over
>>such matters in Aarhus lubricated with Linie aquavit :-) I miss him dearly
>>:-(
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: computational-actors-gu...@googlegroups.com
>>[mailto:computational-actors-gu...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Dale
>>Schumacher
>>Sent: Friday, November 25, 2011 11:54
>>To: Alan Kay; Fundamentals of New Computing
>>Cc: CAG; Programming Language Design; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
>>Coffee Group
>>Subject: [CAG] Re: [fonc] Fexpr the Ultimate Lambda
>>
>>Yes, absolutely! I've read that paper numerous times. Unfortunately, I
>>wasn't able to cite all of the branches of the LISP family tree.
>>
>>I _did_ cite Piumarta's work on Maru. His extensible base is much smaller
>>Shutt's, but Kernel provided a better illustration of actor-based evaluation
>>techniques.
>>
>>On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 1:19 PM, Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> Hi Dale
>>> Check out "The Early History of Smalltalk" to see the same insight
>>> about Lisp and how it was used to think about and define and implement
>>> Smalltalk-72.
>>> Cheers,
>>> Alan
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>> From: Dale Schumacher <dale.schumac...@gmail.com>
>>> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>; CAG
>>> <computational-actors-gu...@googlegroups.com>; Programming Language
>>> Design <pi...@googlegroups.com>; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
>>> Coffee Group <fr...@redfish.com>
>>> Sent: Friday, November 25, 2011 10:05 AM
>>> Subject: [fonc] Fexpr the Ultimate Lambda
>>>
>>> Fexpr the Ultimate Lambda (http://bit.ly/v6yTju) a treatise on
>>> evaluation, in honor of John McCarthy.
>>>
>>> John Shutt’s Kernel language, and its underlying Vau-calculus, is a
>>> simplified reformulation of the foundations of the LISP/Scheme family
>>> of languages. It is based on the notion that evaluation should be
>>> explicit, patterned after Fexprs, rather than implicit, using Lambda.
>>> The results is a powerful well-behaved platform for building
>>> extensible languages. Not extensible in syntax, but in semantics. We
>>> have implemented the key mechanisms of Vau-calculus using actors. The
>>> actor-based evaluation strategy introduces inherent concurrency
>>> prevasively throughout the evaluation process.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> fonc mailing list
>>> fonc@vpri.org
>>> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> fonc mailing list
>>> fonc@vpri.org
>>> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
>>>
>>>
>>
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>>
>
>
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