On Apr 21, 12:46 am, TimDaly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Tim,
> > After I posted about *my* intention to make clisp disappear from Sage
> > in the long term at alt.sci.symbolic William and I got in a long off
> > list discussion with Fateman about Maxima, Axiom, Sage and lisp in
> > general. Among the point Fateman made about me pointing out that
> > building lisp from source sucked were:
>
> > He never had to build lisp from source, so what is the problem?
>
> Richard was deeply involved in lisp and knows a fair bit about the
> subject, more than he lets on, but that's up to him to defend. I
> have great respect for his opinions.
Well, some times he is right, some times he is wrong. That is just the
nature of things.
> I helped William Schelter in the development of GCL back when it
> was known as AKCL. He used my office often during his visits and
> we worked closely on portions of its development. I have written
> parts of the garbage collector and some other small pieces so I'm
> intimately familiar with the guts of it.
I do not doubt that gcl is a good tool, but I doubt it is a good tool
to use in Sage.
> > That is so short sighted it isn't even funny, i.e. water comes out of
> > the spout, electricity is supplied by the socket in the wall. And I
> > can only say the the Open Source lisp community is far behind on its
> > tools ...
>
> eh? really? not for me. but that way lies language-wars so lets stop.
We might measure viability by different standards - let's just leave
it at that ;)
> > In the end it all boils down to platform support and I see ecls as the
> > silver bullet here for Sage+lisp.
>
> I have no idea why you think ECLS is a silver bullet. Three years ago
> I
> moved Axiom onto the handheld Zaurus using GCL. And many years ago I
> moved Axiom onto DOS 3.0 using GCL. Maxima runs (fast) using GCL. Why
> do you want to move off that platform? It contains everything you
> need,
> it builds from source, it is actively maintained, and is very fast.
No, it fails to build on Solaris and since Sage on Solaris is of
essential importance we will/cannot use it. It used to be quite bad on
OSX, but it has gotten much better there. I am certain I can get some
sort of lisp running on pretty much any system, but that is not the
Sage way. We want a self hosted, compile from source anywhere lisp
that Maxima supports and we are now talking about the empty set. Feel
free to prove me wrong, I would be very, very happy to be proven wrong
on this. Ironically the most portable lisp implementation is the one
in Emacs, but I don't think it is common lisp.
> I'm
> sure you have good reasons for choosing ECLS but I don't understand.
I just works with little need to do have a magic lisp machine working
since it uses a C compiler directly.
> Frankly, I'd think that it would be straightforward to write a python
> compiler in lisp (if only the EU would give me the $20M Euro it gave
> the other project).
PyPy sucks and blows at the same time. Throwing money at a problem
never solved it. I am sure you have read the mythical man month. ;)
> Once that was done you could compile and optimize
> the python automatically. My son implemented a commercially available
> PHP compiler in lisp in under 3 years and python is about the same
> complexity.
Sure, I am not saying it is impossible. Some people (like you and
Fateman) prefer lisp and think it is the answer. But if I look around
at people at the university level or a couple years out of it there is
very, very little lisp. So, while the absolute number of lisp
programmers might have grown over the years its part of the
programming market has shrunk since the programming market has gotten
so much bigger. The beautiful thing about Open Source is that as long
as one person cares a project does not die. But that doesn't mean that
lisp+Sage is a good match ;)
> In fact, if I were still teaching the compiler course, I'd
> assign it as a class project. Until python has a decent compiler I
> have trouble considering it anything more than MS-basic with classes.
> (And that, of course, is certainly NOT gonna make me popular).
>
> Tim
Well, I don't see lisp making a come back any time soon. People have
done a python to lisp machine port but it never got very far and there
is quite a difference between "something that works for me" to
"something that works!" - I experience this daily with Sage and it is
hard, hard work to make Sage run and compile beyond the normal Linux &
OSX mix.
Cheers,
Michael
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel
URLs: http://www.sagemath.org
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
