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RE01 Rice Brian T. EM2 | 1 Dec 2001 03:50
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Lisp and languages in general

Hi all,

I can't connect to the Tunes server right now to check on the discussions,
but I thought it appropriate to mention a discussion I saw on the lambda
weblogs a few days ago. MIT had a Little Languages Workshop under the
Dynamic Languages group activity. Anyway, Paul Graham added something to
this discussion about a new Lisp that he was working on; it seems at about
the same level of development as Slate: a decent amount of Lisp code and not
much of a concrete design yet. Anyway, there's an essay reachable from the
following url:

http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$2093

titled "Being Popular" which discusses interesting aspects of programming
language culture and how language design interacts with it. One point I
thought worth mentioning was that Lisp is quite a nice language as such, but
when in Lisp one finds oneself using sub-languages that aren't an extension
of Lisp itself. For example, string operations and escape sequences in Lisp
are exactly the same as one would find them in other languages, and often
less concisely-expressed. The Tunes aspect to this is that we don't have a
unified system here, which at first glance would mean that one would make,
as an example, a regexp-parser and manipulator out of the Lisp reader plus
some macros.

Something else that comes to mind for me is an article explaining
Quasiquotation (by Alan Bawden?) (a Citeseer search should pretty quickly
turn up the right result) where he mentions some of the questionability of
the logic of Lisp-style quotation, summarizing it as a "confusion of
reference and representation". This relates to string-manipulation since
programming languages obviously try to embed a representation of (what
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Francois-Rene Rideau | 2 Dec 2001 01:14
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Re: Please clarify

Dear Ted,

the Glossary ought to reply to most of your questions about orthogonal
persistence. I'll have a (very slightly) updated version soon.

As for what a persistent system can look like, an excellent read is
	A Persistent System in Real Use - Experiences of the First 13 Years
	Joche Liedtke (1993)
	http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/liedtke93persistent.html

As for how to achieve it, it's usually done based on MMU.
See e.g. the docs for Grasshopper, the Texas persistent store, Mungi,
or the british FIDE, FIDE2, Staple, etc., systems.
Actually, techniques used in file systems apply (see the Linux Tux2 fs
or journalled filesystems), the main difference being that in a persistent
system, your have persistent at the object level rather than the file level.

As for categorizing methods, orthogonal persistence makes it
completely independent from the persistence of data.
You can do it with hierarchies, association tables, lists, pools,
or whatever method suits the problem at hand.
That is, you access structured data, variables, etc., as if they were mmap()ed
in a safe and coherent way to persistent memory, instead of having to
manually write application-specific synchronization code over and over.
There will likely be hierarchical namespaces as a standard data repository,
but these namespaces will map names to objects (i.e. structured data),
not to "files" (i.e. sequences of raw bytes).

For the email list, see on
	http://tunes.org/collaboration.html
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Lendvai, Attila 101. | 10 Dec 2001 11:19

Tunes Learning Lounge WAS: Polymorphism (and others)

hi!

it's a very useful resource for newcomers, but it's still not linked
from the main page... now that the winter is here many people will have
some time for some extra reading. or is it still "hidden" by intetntion?
(more work needed, or something)

bye,

101.

:: The TunesLearningLounge 
:: (http://tunes.org/cgi-bin/TunesWiki?TunesLearningLounge)
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Alex | 10 Dec 2001 14:06
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Re: Tunes Learning Lounge WAS: Polymorphism (and others)

On Monday 10 December 2001 11:19, Lendvai, Attila 101. wrote:
> hi!
>
> it's a very useful resource for newcomers, but it's still not linked
> from the main page... now that the winter is here many people will have
> some time for some extra reading. or is it still "hidden" by intetntion?

Yes, indeed. Is there a way to download the whole thing to read it offline?

Cheers,

	Alex

> (more work needed, or something)
>
> bye,
>
> 101.
>
> :: The TunesLearningLounge
> :: (http://tunes.org/cgi-bin/TunesWiki?TunesLearningLounge)
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Fractal A. | 10 Dec 2001 15:23
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Re: Tunes Learning Lounge WAS: Polymorphism (and others)

Alex, 

Here is one way that I download entire sites to my disc.  I hope that it helps.

WebReaper at http://www.webreaper.net/ for Windows Me/98/95 downloads entire
websites to your local disk.  

__Simtel.net description__
Category: Windows Me/98/95 / Web Page / Browser Utilities
Publisher: Bluebeam Ltd
Website: http://www.webreaper.net
Screen Shot: View It!
Program Name: WebReaper, Version 9.8
File Name: wreap98.zip
Downloads: 1970 since 11/26/2001
Ware Type: Freeware
File Size: 956860
File Date: 2001-11-26 04:47:00
Description: Downloads entire websites to your local disk.

--- Alex <alex.lists <at> freenet.de> wrote:
> > it's a very useful resource for newcomers, but it's still not linked
> > from the main page... now that the winter is here many people will have
> > some time for some extra reading. or is it still "hidden" by intetntion?
> 
> Yes, indeed. Is there a way to download the whole thing to read it offline?
> 
> Cheers,
> 	Alex
(Continue reading)

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Brian P Templeton | 10 Dec 2001 16:02
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Re: Tunes Learning Lounge WAS: Polymorphism (and others)

"Fractal A." <fractala <at> yahoo.com> writes:

> Alex, 
> 
> Here is one way that I download entire sites to my disc.  I hope that it helps.
>  
> 
> WebReaper at http://www.webreaper.net/ for Windows Me/98/95 downloads entire
> websites to your local disk.  
> 
[...]
wget works just as well, and is free software.

> --- Alex <alex.lists <at> freenet.de> wrote:
>> > it's a very useful resource for newcomers, but it's still not linked
>> > from the main page... now that the winter is here many people will have
>> > some time for some extra reading. or is it still "hidden" by intetntion?
>> 
>> Yes, indeed. Is there a way to download the whole thing to read it offline?
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 	Alex
> 
>> > :: The TunesLearningLounge
>> > :: (http://tunes.org/cgi-bin/TunesWiki?TunesLearningLounge)
> 
> 
> =====
> Fractal A.                    fractala <at> yahoo.com
>
(Continue reading)

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Alex | 10 Dec 2001 19:30
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Re: Tunes Learning Lounge WAS: Polymorphism (and others)

Thanks, 

but it does not seem to get that Wiki stuff. Is there some way to access the 
Wiki pages other that through the CGI interface. I have never heard of Wiki 
before, but it seems to be dynamic in some way, so there surely is a way to 
get a snapshot of the whole thing !?

Alex

On Monday 10 December 2001 16:02, Brian P Templeton wrote:
> "Fractal A." <fractala <at> yahoo.com> writes:
> > Alex,
> >
> > Here is one way that I download entire sites to my disc.  I hope that it
> > helps.
> >
> >
> > WebReaper at http://www.webreaper.net/ for Windows Me/98/95 downloads
> > entire websites to your local disk.
>
> [...]
> wget works just as well, and is free software.
>
> > --- Alex <alex.lists <at> freenet.de> wrote:
> >> > it's a very useful resource for newcomers, but it's still not linked
> >> > from the main page... now that the winter is here many people will
> >> > have some time for some extra reading. or is it still "hidden" by
> >> > intetntion?
> >>
> >> Yes, indeed. Is there a way to download the whole thing to read it
(Continue reading)

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Tril | 11 Dec 2001 10:17
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Re: Tunes Learning Lounge WAS: Polymorphism (and others)

On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 07:30:43PM +0100, Alex wrote:
> Thanks, 
> 
> but it  does not seem to get that Wiki stuff. Is there some way to access the 
> Wiki pages other that through the CGI interface. I have never heard of Wiki 
> before, but it seems to be dynamic in some way, so there surely is a way to 
> get a snapshot of the whole thing !?
> 
> Alex

wget may be heeding my robots.txt which does not permit robots on
/cgi-bin/ URLs.

I suppose if there is interest I could create a HTML archive of the
entire Wiki site, but I'm not sure why you would want that.  Doesn't it
consist mostly of off-site links, therefore you would want to have net
access when using it?

Yes I did plan to post a link to the Learning Lounge on the main page;
I'll do it in the next day or so.  Thanks for reminding me.

--

-- 
Tril 0. Byte <tril <at> tunes.org> http://tril.tunes.org/
This message is placed in the public domain.
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Brian P Templeton | 15 Dec 2001 23:39
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Re: Tunes Learning Lounge WAS: Polymorphism (and others)

Tril <tril <at> tunes.org> writes:

> On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 07:30:43PM +0100, Alex wrote:
>> Thanks, 
>> 
>> but it  does not seem to get that Wiki stuff. Is there some way to access the 
>> Wiki pages other that through the CGI interface. I have never heard of Wiki 
>> before, but it seems to be dynamic in some way, so there surely is a way to 
>> get a snapshot of the whole thing !?
>> 
>> Alex
> 
> wget may be heeding my robots.txt which does not permit robots on
> /cgi-bin/ URLs.
> 
You can disable robots.txt support in wget by adding

    robots = off

to your ~/.wgetrc. I didn't find a method of doing this temporarily
with a command-line option in the manual (but I didn't check very
thoroughly, either).

> I suppose if there is interest I could create a HTML archive of the
> entire Wiki site, but I'm not sure why you would want that.  Doesn't it
> consist mostly of off-site links, therefore you would want to have net
> access when using it?
> 
wget should work, with ``robots = off'' in the config file (it should
work fairly well, too, since the Wiki doesn't have annoying
(Continue reading)

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Francois-Rene Rideau | 16 Dec 2001 18:21
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Re: microkernel

Dear Drew,

>: Drew Daniels <umdanie8 <at> cc.UManitoba.CA> 2001-12-14
>
> Why do you say in ["Why A New Operating System" A.9, f, xiv] that
> "the protection-handling or proof-checking "microkernel"
> is like the executive" and you seem to indicate that this is
> a good thing although The TUNES Glossary argues against the idea of using
> a microkernel?
>
I do not indicate that this is a good thing.
Actually, as a libertarian, I'm convinced that "executive power",
like any kind of political power is evil.

I'm convinced in private law -- binding contracts between private parties
the legitimacy of which lies in consentment of free individuals.
Such contracts do not require any monopoly of enforcement --
no executive power. They might require enforcement institutions,
but these institutions can be negociated as part of the contract,
instead of being subject to a monopoly of enforcement.

What this means is that, for instance, an "extensible" device driver
may choose to only accept as valid extensions those that follow some
stringent protocol (having such type in such typesystem,
as compiled by such trusted compiler), whereas another device driver
will accept a extensions according to a different contract.

Again, the expensive hoops of runtime kernels might be usefully used
in low-level extensions such as a system virtualizer, a GNU/Linux emulator,
or a generic meta-wrapper for unsafe C libraries.
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