On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 04:56:15PM -0800, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
> The Lisp folks who
> disdained the assembly and C hackers who were spreading information to
> one another in the 80's via BBS's and articles never achieved a critical
> mass because they didn't spread their information out to the "unworthy".
Lisp/Scheme just seems like fun. I'm not sure why Lisp encourages
this attitude you're talking about. Why didn't C or Fortran or C++
create the same attitude?
> As for getting lost, even now, with a lot more age, experience, and
> resources available, it's really hard to dig backwards for *simple*
> Lisp/Scheme implementation things because you are groveling across the
> simple stuff in the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's where there is no modern
> indexing, searching, etc. (the papers are PDF images if available at
> all). If you *do* find those implementation details, they are wired to
> the hardware of the day and are hard to abstract (this is prior to the
> release and victory of C). The worst is the number of "private
> communications" that spread some piece of information that is now lost
> to time.
>
> In addition, things for Lisp were written in Lisp ("Only a heathen would
> implement a Lisp in FORTRAN!"). This meant that nobody without a Lisp
> machine could use a Lisp paper. It also obfuscated understanding by
> confusing what was implemented with what was borrowed from the
> underlying environment. Take a look at the original Lambda papers and
> try to figure out what you will have to reimplement if you don't have
> Lisp available as the implementation language. It's not an easy task.
What in God's name could you want to know about Lisp that isn't in
SICP, Lisp in Small Pieces or the numerous other Lisp books floating
around? Are you trying to build another Lisp Machines company or something?
> Of course, finding such a simple implementation to look at is amazingly
> difficult (I have found one, details at bottom). The moment such a
> simple implementation springs into existence, it starts accreting
> features. Without source repositories, you can't unwind the later
> optimizations.
What are you talking about? Scheme/Lisp implementations are a dime a dozen.
....especially incomplete unoptimized ones like mine. :)
> So far, the best pedagogical Scheme I have found is minischeme
> (sometimes called miniscm). It was the original basis for TinyScheme.
>
> It's about 2500 lines of C code:
> http://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/scheme-repository/imp/minischeme.tar.gz
>
> This implementation is supposedly based upon something published in Japan:
>
> > This Mini-Scheme Interpreter is based on "SCHEME Interpreter in
> > Common Lisp" in Appendix of T.Matsuda & K.Saigo, Programming of LISP,
> > archive No5 (1987) p6 - p42 (published in Japan).
>
> If you can help me find this original (even if it is in Japanese I can
> probably decode it), I would appreciate it.
>
> In addition, I would have liked to look at the papers for PC-Scheme, but
> I can't seem to find them easily. I may actually have to go to one of
> the local University libraries and see if they actually have the journals.
What do you mean by "best"? I'm curious what your objectives are.
Is it too early to invest? :)
Chris
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