On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 01:57:46PM -0800, Tracy R Reed wrote: > They have. Lots of them. But none that you are likely to have heard of. > Lisp is famous for creating "domain specific languages" or DSL's. You > will see that being done in SICP and the lectures. They create their own > little language/set of functions for doing some basic image > manipulation. This idea can be extended to many other areas.
I must admit DSLs are a good example. I forgot about them. > They do not > traditionally use Lisp to make other languages with really complicated > C-like syntaxes because people who code in Lisp tend to not like such > syntaxes and they are more work to implement. Imagine we are CPU/system board designers needing to crank out C compilers for each new product. Certainly we need to abstract away *something* to avoid reinventing the wheel everytime. I believe gcc has an low level intermediate form it compiles to. I wonder how close that intermediate form is to Lisp. > Again, only the ones you are aware of. There are untold numbers of DSL's > out there in Lisp. And as far as C/assembly/register based machines go > look up what car and cdr originally stood for. And note that Lisp was > invented before C. So maybe before C came along people *did* implement the next big languages in Lisp first!? > >What would really interest me is if someone invented a CPU whose hardware > >wasn't based on registers and C compilers but somehow built from the > >ground up > >to be a Lisp/functional processor. > > This is exactly what Lisp Machines and Symbolics did. Yes but are you sure their CPUs had no registers? Are you sure they weren't similar to "normal" CPUs? Exactly what was so "innovative" about them and why were they more exciting than say a CPU opmitized for Java? cs -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
