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17:07:22
beach
Major progress today. I fixed all the problems in phase 4 that made it impossible to load definitions of generic functions in the Ersatz environment (E5). Tomorrow, I'll attempt to load class definitions into that environment, and I'll start fixing the problems introduced in phase 4 that make that attempt unsuccessful.
17:11:30
beach
The bugs that I fixed today are of the kind where you say "how can anything have worked in the past".
17:14:52
beach
Hmm, not so good progress after all. The generic functions I load have not been properly initialized.
17:15:34
beach
Anyway, I am not going to attempt any more coding today. It has been a long day already.
21:00:28
zacts
beach: I wonder about the idea of being able to extend a Lisp OS in such a way to where it appears to be much like unix to the user, yet you can extend it in non-unixy ways underneath.
21:02:13
zacts
like you would be able to use a shell kind of like posix and all of that, with unixy pipes and filters, yet you could also extend beyond this as well if you wanted.
21:11:11
zacts
Like, Racket for example has one goal of letting you implement different languages that work well together. Another project, Rubinius has this kind of goal as well. Take that idea to the OS level, and you could have a user implement a Unix flavor that plays with another flavor of OS all on the same system kind of. I hope this makes any sense.
21:21:59
Bike
i understand what you mean. i think beach would like an actual replacement for the posix interface rather than something that's just different underneath, though.
21:24:09
jackdaniel
pre-cl common lisp environments provided c compilers and probably something posix-like
1:58:56
lottaquestions
Hi all, if someone is a beginner and would like to understand how lisp-like languages are built (other than looking at SICL which is pretty advanced), which would be the best book to use?
2:00:01
no-defun-allowed
Chapters 4 and 5 of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs provide several interpreters and compilers, respectively.
2:01:52
lottaquestions
And there is this book Build Your Own Lisp by Daniel Holden that people say is not particularly great either
2:02:43
no-defun-allowed
Build Your Own Lisp is utter shite - the target language is horrid, and the implementation is also quite poor C and uses bad techniques.
2:04:25
no-defun-allowed
Quick examples: For some symbol A, we know (eq 'A 'A). But that interpreter compares symbol names instead of interning. And list accessors evaluate the contents of the list, as there are no list constructors that aren't quoting.
2:06:30
no-defun-allowed
Pardon me for asking, how much have you written in Lisp? I think the author would have realised he messed up if he tried to write non-trivial programs in his language, and that is a very useful diagnostic.
2:08:07
no-defun-allowed
Noteworthy isn't necessary, but writing some moderate-size programs is probably a good idea.
2:09:39
no-defun-allowed
Knowing the language would help you spot bugs in your implementation, as you can compare what happens to what you would expect to happen.
2:10:40
lottaquestions
Yes, I am working on understanding the language. I have read PCL, currently reading phoes book which is enlightening