freenode/#sicl - IRC Chatlog
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4:56:04
beach
Today, my favorite coauthor is coming over for lunch, but there is not much work involved this time (bread is already baked, soup is ready for consumption) so I should be able to make some progress on bootstrapping as well.
5:13:19
no-defun-allowed
Yes, I have three more to go. After two weeks of year 12 orientation, summer vacation will begin.
5:13:29
beach
You guys are lucky that the summer vacation coincides with the end of the year. Here on the northern hemisphere, it's a mess.
5:13:47
no-defun-allowed
Those three are chemistry, physics and English language (not learning the language but about the language).
5:14:39
no-defun-allowed
Hah, maybe. Summer is still offset a month back to my intuition and that confuses me sometimes.
5:17:17
beach
English is a mess, but then, so is Swedish, because of the influence of German during the Hanseatic era and French during the periods when French was the language of choice for the royal courts.
5:17:35
no-defun-allowed
English colonies were the biggest influence after, with some new words and widening of word meanings from industrial progress also since 1500.
5:18:55
no-defun-allowed
Admittedly our English language teacher isn't very helpful, and topics go very slowly.
5:19:42
beach
Languages evolve seemingly without external influence, of course. I notice this because I visit Sweden at most once a year, and every time I go there, there is some change in usage and grammar.
5:19:45
no-defun-allowed
Once one of the principals came in during a visit by government inspectors and after the inspectors left I heard they didn't have a pleasant conversation.
5:20:31
no-defun-allowed
Yes, we are also taught about those too, as people adopt a language it is passed through internal filtering by the brain's grammar to acquire some regularity.
5:21:36
no-defun-allowed
One study was done where they gave participants gibberish words for collections of alien fruit. After about ten generations, the gibberish became very regular three-syllable words logically describing the collection.
5:23:13
beach
If you are interested in the English language, and language in general, his books are a must.
5:30:32
jcowan
no-defun-allowed, beach: I am a linguist by avocation, though English is my only language, so I will be glad to discuss English or linguistics in #lispcafe or elsewhere.
6:34:43
beach
GAH! In phase 2, I define ALLOCATE-INSTANCE in environment E2 so that it creates objects with the standard SICL structure, i.e. a header object and a rack object.
6:34:51
beach
But then I discovered that I don't do anything in phase 3 to define ALLOCATE-INSTANCE. The reason I discovered it is that when I tried to quasi-copy phase 3 in order to obtain phase 4, I suddenly needed ALLOCATE-INSTANCE in environment E3.
6:34:57
beach
It would be very surprising if I needed ALLOCATE-INSTANCE in phases 2 and 4 but not 3.
6:35:03
beach
So today, I'll try to clean that up so that ALLOCATE-INSTANCE in environment E2 is defined in phase 3 instead of phase 2.
7:11:17
fiddlerwoaroof
Does SICL have its own garbage collector, or does it rely on the host's garbage collector?
7:12:18
no-defun-allowed
there is a directory called Garbage-collector but it doesn't appear to have a GC
7:13:14
no-defun-allowed
it does however appear to have an allocator and a "heap" (1gb array) to allocate from, but i don't think SICL uses it since it would have crashed my small heap tests
7:16:21
fiddlerwoaroof
Cool, I've been somewhat idly thinking about the feasibility of porting a CL implementation to produce web assembly
7:22:32
no-defun-allowed
you get a visualiser and you can do enough scheme in the mutator to make it useful
7:26:28
fiddlerwoaroof
do you mean this: https://docs.racket-lang.org/plai/collector.html?q=plai%2Fgc
7:33:11
beach
fiddlerwoaroof: But during bootstrapping, it uses the host memory manager, and several host object types as well like numbers, conses, symbols, packages, etc.
7:35:11
beach
fiddlerwoaroof: I specified a pretty advanced memory manager for SICL. http://metamodular.com/sicl.pdf chapter 22, page 119 (PDF page 129).
7:39:45
no-defun-allowed
how did you make those tables in TeX? iirc \begin{table} doesn't break the vertical lines on hlines
7:41:27
no-defun-allowed
well, i flicked to the backends in chapter 25 and it had the nice register tables
7:47:08
beach
I am often made fun of for using xfig (a very old program, but very competent) to make figures for inclusion in LaTeX documents. There is a fig2dev program that fits nicely into the `make' way of doing things.
7:48:42
beach
The .fig format is text, so it can be edited with an ordinary text editor, which is often more practical than to use the GUI.
7:49:48
no-defun-allowed
i've only used TikZ with pgfplots for doing graphs on my physics and chemistry posters, and plain TikZ for one flowchart (which doesn't look that nice, since i don't know how to add arrows)
7:54:57
beach
I understand. I am not the right person for this kind of stuff. I try to get the work done with appropriate tools. Only if I find I am somehow held back by my current tools I search for better ones.
8:03:35
fiddlerwoaroof
TikZ can also do some amazing things for figures, if you look at its documentation.