October 2004 - lisp-hh - mailman3.common-lisp.net

[lisp-hh] Meeting November
by Edi Weitz 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

Moin! So, nach einigem Hin und Her ist nun zumindest sicher, daß wir am 28.11. den Raum wieder bekommen können, den wir beim letzten Mal schon hatten. Den habe ich jetzt gebucht. Nächstes Meeting also am Sonntag, 28.11.04 - 14 Uhr Landesjugendring Hamburg Güntherstr. 34 Wir haben diesmal leider NICHT den Beamer des LJR benutzen. Es wäre daher nett, wenn jemand einen besorgen könnte. Freiwillige bitte vor... :) Momentan habe ich die folgenden Leute als _potentiell_ Vortragende auf meiner Liste: - Pascal Costanza: AspectL - Mario Mommer: (incf ffi) - ein universelles FFI-Framework - Manuel Odendahl: bknr - Lothar Hotz: NetCLOS - Edi Weitz: SLIME-Demo Falls jemand auf dieser Liste jetzt schon weiß, daß er am 28.11. nicht kann, oder falls ich zu voreilig war und er gar nichts vortragen möchte, möge er mir das bitte kurz mitteilen. Danke. Grüße und bis dann, Edi.

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[lisp-hh] Re: [cl-lc] Re: [benelux-lispers] Free position: eurolisp list master
by Edi Weitz 15 Oct '04

15 Oct '04

On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 08:34:04 +0200, Mario Mommer <mommer(a)igpm.rwth-aachen.de> wrote: > There are a few decissions that we have to take: wether to allow > postings from non-subscribers (the default - so it is now. My vote > is subscribers only) This is also my vote because of spam. > and wether new subscribers need approval from someone or not (right > now, anyone can subscribe) as was on the yahoo groups lists. I don't think that's necessary. Cheers, Edi.

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[lisp-hh] Re: [cl-lc] Re: [benelux-lispers] Free position: eurolisp list master
by Arthur Lemmens 15 Oct '04

15 Oct '04

Tayssir John Gabbour <tayss_temp2(a)yahoo.com> writes: > I would do this assuming there are other volunteers to divide the > responsibility on. OK, I'm willing to share this with you. Maybe we can just switch duties every month or so. If you do it now until the 1st of November, I'll do it in November. Does that sound reasonable? Arthur

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[lisp-hh] Re: [cl-lc] Re: [benelux-lispers] Free position: eurolisp list master
by Tayssir John Gabbour 15 Oct '04

15 Oct '04

Hi Mario, I would do this assuming there are other volunteers to divide the responsibility on. Because some days I won't be interested or too busy. I think things like passwords should be kept to a minimum. Presumably the initial configuration will be trivial, so feel free to give me the password and I'll see how trivial it is. MfG, Tayssir --- Mario Mommer <mommer(a)igpm.rwth-aachen.de> wrote: > Arthur Lemmens <alemmens(a)xs4all.nl> writes: > > Maybe you could give us some info about what this would > > mean in practice? Thanks. > > Having the list password somewhere, taking care of subscription > problems, kicking out people who are not nice, deciding wether they > should get a monthly reminder of their passwords, deciding if > subscription is open to anyone, etc. > > Pretty much the same as running a yahoo group. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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[lisp-hh] Re: [benelux-lispers] Free position: eurolisp list master
by Arthur Lemmens 14 Oct '04

14 Oct '04

Hi Mario, > Any volunteers? Maybe you could give us some info about what this would mean in practice? Thanks. Arthur

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[lisp-hh] Re: [benelux-lispers] Too many mailing lists
by Dirk Gerrits 14 Oct '04

14 Oct '04

Mario Mommer <mommer(a)igpm.rwth-aachen.de> writes: > Dirk Gerrits <dirk(a)dirkgerrits.com> writes: >> Mario, could you perhaps subscribe me? Or set up a subscription page >> somewhere else? > > subscribing you is easier. Will do so when the list opens. Thanks, although I just might be able to do it myself. The situation has improved to the point that the packet loss has dropped from 100% to 45%. Kind regards, Dirk Gerrits

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[lisp-hh] Re: [ANN] Erlisp website
by Hoehle, Joerg-Cyril 14 Oct '04

14 Oct '04

Dirk, I wish you good luck. I recommend you to read Matthew Fuchs' PhD (1995) about Dreme. It's Erlang concepts taken to an implementation of Scheme. I'd appreciate a Common Lisp with real language-level concurrency (parallelism?), like in Erlang. The Dreme paper once made be believe a threading Oaklisp with a software write barrier as the basis for a generational GC would be doable on the Amiga (no time to figure it out :) -- Oaklisp also is a byte-code machine. The key was that each thread would have its own 1st generation memory pool, so allocation would be very fast, and copying to the shared heap would only occur when needed, i.e. for message passing. In my simple model, the GC would need to stop all threads (or rather wait until each reaches a safe point, e.g. doing I/O or consing). Each time I suggested adding Coroutines to CLISP, the proposal was turned down because "threads are the real thing". Gilbert Baumann once had coroutines in his copy of CLISP in 1998, but that was never integrated and I fear it's lost. IMHO, threads are not the real thing, because - they cost too much (resources for stack, context switch) - they introduce need for synchronization, where there was no need before. Erlang and Oz schow, among others, that it's possible to express some problems very elegantly using seemingly parallel constructs, but without the need for actual threads. >easier to use and less "low-level" than this industry best practice. IMHO, an approach similar to Erlang's, or also using constrained variables like in the Oz language could be a key to fun/beautiful/readable/verifyable concurrency, as opposed to the thread-stuck, thread-savy and thread-heavy industrial practice. I call the "Smalltalk lie" because it talks about message passing whereas all it's doing is synchronous (blocking) method calls, with all the known problems. Erlang does real message passing in my words, because the senders and receivers are autonomous. Although I have followed the evolution of Erlang for several years, I sadly haven't used it in a project. I tend to stick to single-threaded applications using CLISP, Kawa (Scheme in a JVM), or use Python's coroutines here and there, longing for a better world. [BTW, isn't there a better place for this than 3 mailing lists?] Regards, Jörg Höhle.

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[lisp-hh] Re: [benelux-lispers] Too many mailing lists
by Arthur Lemmens 14 Oct '04

14 Oct '04

Hi Mario, > I can set it up on cl.net tonight, for instance. That would be great. > How should it be called? lisp-eu(a)common-lisp.net would be my > sugestion. I prefer "eurolisp(a)common-lisp.net" (I think Pascal suggested this name a few months ago). Arthur

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[lisp-hh] Too many mailing lists
by Pascal Costanza 14 Oct '04

14 Oct '04

Hi, We definitely have too many mailing lists. I have got three copies of each posting in recent discussions, and that doesn't really help to keep track of what's happening. We already had a brief discussion, and I think a consensus, that a European Lisp mailing list would be great. In order to help that mailing list become a reality, I can offer to write an introductory text for the respective website. (I would prefer a Wiki-style website so that later on people can change the text or, for example, translate it into French and other European languages.) If other people can take over the responsibility to set up the mailing list and later on promote it on the various channels, we should relatively quickly be done with this. Any volunteers? Pascal -- Pascal Costanza University of Bonn mailto:costanza@web.de Institute of Computer Science III http://www.pascalcostanza.de Römerstr. 164, D-53117 Bonn (Germany)

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[lisp-hh] Terminology [Was: Re: [ANN] Erlisp website]
by Dirk Gerrits 14 Oct '04

14 Oct '04

Luke Gorrie <luke(a)synap.se> writes: Hi Luke. > Erlisp sounds cool, I'm looking forward to see what you come up with. I'm glad I sparked your interest. I'm looking forward to see what I come up with as well. ;) > For now I suggest adopting the definition that /concurrency/ is > juggling a lot of different tasks at once, whereas /parallelism/ is > optimization by using multiple processors at the same time. With these > definitions Erlang and Erlisp are about concurrency and not parallelism. Hmm, I should add a terminology page. But I could use some suggestions for it. The way I see it, there are (at least) 5 related concepts: 1. juggling a lot of different tasks at once on a single machine with a single processor 2. juggling a lot of different tasks at once on a single machine with multiple processors 3. juggling a lot of different tasks at once on a single machine (regardless of its number of processors) 4. juggling a lot of different tasks at once across multiple machines 5. juggling a lot of different tasks at once (regardless of the number of machines involved) I was using the terminology: 1. - 2. - 3. dirk:parallelism 4. dirk:distribution 5. dirk:concurrency What would would you suggest? 1. - 2. - 3. luke:concurrency 4. luke:distribution 5. luke:concurrent and luke:distributed ? I would really like to have a single word for each of 3, 4, and 5. But I do share your sentiment that the 1 vs 2 distinction is not really interesting (from a language design standpoint). If I need to mention 1 and 2 at all, I'll just write them out in full. BTW, "processor" should probably be defined more thoroughly as well. It seems to be hot these days to make CPUs with multiple cores. > This is an important distinction. Parallelism is boring: everybody's > already read old papers about parallel Lisps and nobody's actually > writing parallel Lisp programs. Concurrency is sexy: everybody's > writing concurrent programs (McCLIM, Araneida, etc etc) and Erlisp is > trying to break ground by making these programs much easier to write. I agree, in principle, but the luke:parallel Lisps of old also had a luke:concurrency aspect, and some of them look really interesting. > Don't be labelled as just another parallel Lisp! :-) Well so far Erlisp has mostly been labelled as an "Erlang in Lisp". While that isn't half bad, I'd like to go beyond that once I really get there. ;) > P.S., IMO two great background reading books are _Communicating > Sequential Processes_ by Hoare (online at www.usingcsp.com) and _The > Architecture of Concurrent Programs_ by Per Brinch Hansen (library, or > cheap at www.bookfinder.com) They have both books at my university's library, which is good as I don't like reading large amounts of a text of a computer screen. :) I've already read the first, I'll have to pick up the second some time. Thanks for the pointers. Kind regards, Dirk Gerrits

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[lisp-hh] [ANN] Erlisp website
by Dirk Gerrits 13 Oct '04

13 Oct '04

Hello my Lisping friends, I've already told some of you this, but I've started on a project to bring Erlang's light-weight, message passing concurrency to Common Lisp. Today I've finished completely overhauling my website, and I've created a project website for Erlisp in the process. (See: http://www.dirkgerrits.com/erlisp/) Here's a brief summary: Why is it that Common Lisp is better than "mainstream" languages in a lot of ways, but not in parallelism and distributed programming? Is it just because threads with shared memory and locking are the best we can do for parallelism, and because socket and RPC libraries are totally adequate for distributed programming? I think the answer is no. Some older Lisps and a few younger, non-Lisp languages like Erlang have intriguing approaches to concurrency that are easier to use and less "low-level" than this industry best practice. Erlisp is my attempt to bring some of these ideas to Common Lisp, and perhaps develop some new approaches in the process. Phase 1 of this project will involve bringing (most of) the features of the Erlang programming language to Common Lisp. Erlang is a small but powerful functional, parallel, and distributed programming language originally developed at Ericsson for use in the telecom industry. It's been really successful as a parallel and distributed programming language, and is pretty Lisp-like for a language with syntax, so it seems like a good starting point. Phase 2 is much bolder and involves doing for models of parallel and distributed programming what the CLOS MOP did for object systems. The design of such a metaobject protocol is a hard and evolutionary process with which I have absolutely no experience, so this is very much a long-term goal. So far, there is no code to speak of. Just Erlisp's roadmap, describing the basic plan of attack for its realization, and a list of references to relevant articles, books, etc. Questions, comments, suggestions, articles, books, prior art, and constructive criticism are always welcome. Just reply to this e-mail, in private or through the mailing list. Kind regards, Dirk Gerrits

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[lisp-hh] Meetings 4 und 5
by Edi Weitz 12 Oct '04

12 Oct '04

Moin! Nach dem sehr interessanten und erfolgreichen Amsterdam-Meeting (Hi Arthur!) würde ich gerne etwas ähnliches auch in Hamburg hinkriegen. Damit Leute, die von weiter weg kommen, nicht zu viel Geld und Zeit investieren müssen, sollten wir damit aber noch etwas warten. Arthur meinte, und ich stimme ihm zu, daß einmal pro Quartal wohl eine gute Frequenz für ein "großes" Lisp-Meeting wäre. Damit würde es auf Januar/Februar hinauslaufen, ich präferiere aber Anfang März, weil dann die Autofahrer hoffentlich etwas bessere Chancen haben und Hamburg evtl. auch besser aussieht. (Als Lokalpatriot sollte man den touristischen Aspekt nicht ganz außer acht lassen... :) Um die Wartezeit zu überbrücken vielleicht vorher noch ein "kleines" Meeting? Im November? Vorschlag: 1. Übernächstes Meeting in Hamburg Anfang März an einem Sonntag. Vorträge diverser Lisp-Celebrities, u.a. wohl Christophe Rhodes, Luke Gorrie und Arthur Lemmens, vielleicht auch Mario Mommer. Ggf. am Samstagabend gemeinsames Abendessen der bereits Anwesenden irgendwo auf dem Kiez ("Abendmahl" oder sowas). Ort: Ich suche noch - aber etwas, was zentraler liegt und etwas netter ist als der Landesjugendring. 2. Nächstes Meeting am 14.11. um 14 Uhr am selben Ort (LJR) wie beim letzten Mal, falls niemand grundsätzliche Einwände gegen Ort und Zeit hat (und ich den Raum für diesen Tag reservieren kann). Anschließend irgendwo essen gehen. Da es in letzter Zeit ein paar Anfragen in diese Richtung gab, würde ich vorschlagen, daß wir (zumindest auch) was für "Newbies" anbieten. Ich könnte z.B. bei Interesse ein bißchen demonstrieren, wie man mit SLIME arbeitet. Dann wäre ich endlich mal gezwungen, mir das selbst genauer anzusehen... :) Andere Ideen/Vorschläge für Vorträge, Demos undsoweiter? Frage, Wünsche, Beschwerden? Vielleicht hat auch jemand Lust, bei der Organisation mitzuhelfen? Grüße, Edi. PS: Daß es ein "kleines" Meeting werden soll, sollte natürlich niemanden von außerhalb davon abhalten, vorbeizukommen. Sooo klein soll es dann ja auch nicht werden.

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