November 2009 - toronto-lisp - mailman3.common-lisp.net

[toronto-lisp] meeting Dec. 1
by Paul Tarvydas 01 Dec '09

01 Dec '09

Tomorrow is the monthly meeting at LinuxCafe. Does anyone have a presentation? pt

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[toronto-lisp] CL Books
by David Penton 21 Nov '09

21 Nov '09

At the last meeting I recommended Seibel's Practical Common Lisp. I should qualify that recommendation. I am now augmenting my study by going methodically through Graham's ANSI Common Lisp. Doing the exercises has been invaluable to me. So, I would recommend Graham's book for those who are beginning with CL. However, had I only used Graham's book I may have become bored with the simple examples, since I am not a beginner at programming generally. I also have the books listed below, either in hardcopy or digital form. Should I also consider looking at The Little Schemer and related works? What about Doug Hoyte's book? I recognize that a surfeit of textbooks does not guaranty progress. Rest assured that I am actually programming in CL too. Basic Lisp Techniques (Cooper) Common Lisp An Interactive Approach (Shapiro) Common Lisp A Gentle Approach to Symbolic Computation (Touretzky) On Lisp (Graham) Successful Lisp (Lamkins) Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Lisp in Small Pieces (Queinnec) The Art of the Metaobject Protocol (Kiczales et al) - Dave -

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[toronto-lisp] pretty printing
by David Penton 17 Nov '09

17 Nov '09

I am baffled (or dense). I cannot get pprint to do what I think it should in any of openmcl, sbcl, or LW. An example given in the ANSI spec/Hyperspec under *print-pretty* is: (let ((*print-pretty* t)) (progn (write '(let ((a 1) (b 2) (c 3)) (+ a b c))) nil)) >> (LET ((A 1) >> (B 2) >> (C 3)) >> (+ A B C)) => NIL I don't get any indentation when I type that example into any of the CL implementations listed above. The example just gets printed on one line of output, no indentation. Am I supposed to do some additional thing to get the output shown? - Dave -

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[toronto-lisp] Request for advice on learning CLOS and MOP (mostly MOP)
by David Penton 16 Nov '09

16 Nov '09

I have been working my way through Seibel's Practical Common Lisp. In one of the chapters (ch.24) Seibel illustrates keeping track of the inherited slots of a class by tucking the information away in a symbol plist. This immediately made me wonder why he did not use something built in to the object system to query a class about itself. Thus I came to investigate MOP stuff, which I believe does provide for the functionality needed in Seibel's example. (I used MOP fns CLASS-SLOTS and CLASS-DIRECT-SLOTS to do the job.) I am considering ordering the book The Art of the MetaObject Protocol by Kiczales et al. However, I wonder if that is really the book I want. I am not so much interested in how it is all implemented as I am in learning about fairly pragmatic reflection functionality. Is anyone familiar with this book? Is it mostly about implementing CLOS? Is there a better resource for learning to use MOP functionality at a basic level? thx - Dave -

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[toronto-lisp] OT: clojure -> DLL hell -> help needed
by Paul Tarvydas 12 Nov '09

12 Nov '09

After playing around with clojure, I found that one of my purchased apps no longer works. The vendor is clueless, so I'm going to have to suss this out myself. The error message is exactly like the one in this post: http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t94058.html but I don't understand what they're talking about (I obviously don't understand the Java nor Eclipse environments) nor how to solve the problem. If anyone can help, email me directly (unless you think the rest of the mailing list would be interested :-). Thanks. pt

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[toronto-lisp] graham's seminal paper
by Paul Tarvydas 10 Nov '09

10 Nov '09

What is the title of Paul Graham's seminal paper about Lisp and his success? Is it "Beating the Averages"? He has a zillion papers listed on his site, and now viewing the list, I'm not sure. Hey, you guessed it - I'm having one of those "defend the use of lisp" moments. Sigh. thanx pt

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[toronto-lisp] A Not Strictly Lisp Question
by David Penton 09 Nov '09

09 Nov '09

Or maybe, to be frank, perhaps not a lisp question at all. So delete this if you are busy. However...from the two meetings of the Toronto lisp group I have attended, I gather that several of you do web development, or related stuff. So some of you are probably knowledgeable in areas that are a mystery to me. I made it CASCON today and enjoyed the session on "Practical Ontology Infrastructure". Of course, this topic has plenty of connections to things that may interest the lisp community. But that topic is not the source of my questions, or rather my bafflement. Over the past ten years I have often been utterly flummoxed and not a little annoyed when I try to grasp what is going on in the "business world" of computing. At CASCON this week many of the sessions were about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). The notion of SOA came to my attention some time ago, but although I looked it up on wikipedia and even read some commercial blurbs on it, I still have no damned idea what they are talking about. I enjoy learning things that seem like "computer science." But I cannot for the life of me penetrate this combined computing and business stuff. From my limited, jaded, and admittedly dated perspective, it seems we are subjected to a never-ending succession of questionable panaceas, cooked up - maybe - by marketing people. The ones that are about computing over the internet seem particularly offensively squishy to me. Would anybody be willing to fill me in, perhaps not on the mailing list if it is too off-topic? LIke, as I struggle to learn lisp and such, should I really pay attention to "software as a service", "service oriented architecture", and so on ad infinitum? Or should I just grow old and die of gum disease and varicose veins. F**k. - Dave -

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[toronto-lisp] Japanese Lisp Manga
by Rudolf Olah 09 Nov '09

09 Nov '09

http://lambda.bugyo.tk/cdr/mwl/ It's awesome. Looks great, no idea what the words mean, but the code snippets look nice and easy :-D -Rudolf

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[toronto-lisp] Link: Array languages for Lisp programmers
by Abram Hindle 07 Nov '09

07 Nov '09

http://www.vector.org.uk/?vol=24&no=2&art=blazeski A comparison of J and Q and lisp and how you do J and Q things in lisp. Also a comparison of functional snippets versus the loop macro. abram

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[toronto-lisp] Some notes about this meeting
by Abram Hindle 04 Nov '09

04 Nov '09

* Lisp Meet - Java Dissambly - 11 people - SISC used for webapps - weblocks for CL - http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-weblocks/ - used tomcat to run SISC scripts - composure in clojure (web framework) - Doug Explains antiweb - explains pre-forking - antiweb pools processes - processes can have more than 1 connection - goal: reliability - process oriented - hub - route msgs - logger - priveledged port listening and transfering - etc. - transfer connections to other processes - send filehandle over a socket - domain sockets - scmwrites - sendmsg manpage - doesn't proxy like ngix - serves static content - runs lisp for dynamic content - claims it is easy to setup - db layer to be done - bdb - transactions - for admins - awp files - like php - caches - lisp forms - (page ...) - compiled - post handler and get handler do dynamic content.. - build http response - give it headers etc. - cared about # of syscalls that responsed - vish asked how to scale up to multiple installations - not quite there yet - ngix to dispatch to antiweb if you want it - supervisor processes - - weblocks build script broken - let over lambda discussion - closures & OO - macros - free vars - var capture - duality of syntax - read macros - hooks into the textual processor - how to read strings in differently - not in scheme - double quote is a read macro - paren is a read macro - clojure against read macros - perl vs lisp - like sourcefilter but more reliable - plt blog - camlp4 in ocaml http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org/camlp4_3.10/foreach_tutorial - closures & macros - pandora's macros - like tcl's uplevel - lexical scope, open it up - alambda binds self - effeciency - get close to metal - smart array making - sorting network - selection networks - forth - threads as cons - forth review - there's compiler macros in chap7 - precompute format strings - precomputation - keyword macro - scheme - small scheme - big scheme - r6rs - new scheme plans - continuations - gambit has serializable continuations - business processes are boring - paul grahm and continuations (on lisp) w/ closures - dangers of crypto & sending the user their state - web programming - ruby/python - large community - community support - base64 as an example of why you want libs - iron scheme & common larceny - r6rs compatible? - common larceny does - libraries - antiweb - CFFI - http://common-lisp.net/project/cffi/ - gambit scheme - iphone app - embed C inside - apple hates freedom - abram trolls the entire group about software freedoms - sorry XD - vish talks about C# and tools - F# ! - some stuff I forget - william gibson and CL - greg wilson talk at DEV days - toronto news - accordian guy - uot events - our list - tpm - trug - lugs - python users group - toronto perl mongers -

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