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lambda.txt -- the ultimate fortune file
Raw
lambda.txt
This is the file LAMBDA.TXT, version 11.
Last Edit: 2005-Sep-13
To install on systems using BSD fortune(6), rename this file "lambda" and
store it in the appropriate fortunes directory, usually /usr/games/fortune
or /usr/share/fortune or something like that. Then in that directory run
strfile(8) on the "lambda" file which should produce a "lambda.dat". To
test, go to some other directory with no file called "lambda" in it, and
say "fortune lambda". If you get a lispy fortune you win. If not you lose.
To install on other systems simply find a fortune program, install it, and
then install this file. Or write your own fortune program in Lisp.
The newest version of this file can usually be found at
http://www.gotlisp.com/lambda/lambda.txt
If the version at that URL has not changed signifigantly in some time or
if you have contributions you wish to make to this file then please email
the maintainer, James A. Crippen at <jcrippen at gmail com>.
The original contents of this file were extracted from DSK:COMMON;LINS 463
on the MIT ITS systems. The entries selected were chosen for their lambda
nature. Other additions were found through BSD fortune(6), USENET, and
similarly disreputable sources.
If you are using this file in a fortune(6)-like program and you see this
text then your program is borken. It shouldn't display the first fortune in
the file. You lose. Use Lisp instead.
%
Data and procedures and the values they amass,
Higher-order functions to combine and mix and match,
Objects with their local state, the messages they pass,
A property, a package, the control point for a catch-
In the Lambda Order they are all first-class.
One Thing to name them all, One Thing to define them,
One Thing to place them in environments and bind them,
In the Lambda Order they are all first-class.
-- The TI PC Scheme Manual
%
Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
-- Michael A. Petonic
%
... it's just that in C++ and the like, you don't trust _anybody_,
and in CLOS you basically trust everybody. the practical result
is that thieves and bums use C++ and nice people use CLOS.
-- Erik Naggum
%
A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a Xerox
1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser. Wanting to
help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network with the mouse,
and asked "what do you see?" Very earnestly, the Undergraduate replied "I
see a cursor." The Hacker then quickly pressed the boot toggle at the back
of the keyboard, while simultaneously hitting the Undergraduate over the head
with a thick Interlisp Manual. The Undergraduate was then Enlightened.
%
A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the
power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly,
"You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding
of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The
machine worked.
%
Howe's Law:
Everyone has a scheme that will not work.
%
A CONS is an object which cares.
-- Bernie Greenberg.
%
A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating
his morning meal. "I would like to give you this personality test", said
the outsider, "because I want you to be happy."
Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the
toaster -- "I wish the toaster to be happy too".
%
A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
-- Alan Perlis
%
A man from AI walked across the mountains to SAIL to see the Master,
Knuth. When he arrived, the Master was nowhere to be found. "Where is the
wise one named Knuth?" he asked a passing student.
"Ah," said the student, "you have not heard. He has gone on a
pilgrimage across the mountains to the temple of AI to seek out new
disciples."
Hearing this, the man was Enlightened.
%
A student, in hopes of understanding the Lambda-nature, came to Greenblatt.
As they spoke a Multics system hacker walked by. "Is it true", asked the
student, "that PL-1 has many of the same data types as Lisp?" Almost before
the student had finished his question, Greenblatt shouted, "FOO!", and hit
the student with a stick.
%
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
-- Alan Perlis
%
=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ========================
CAR and CDR now return extra values.
The function CAR now returns two values. Since it has to go to the trouble
to figure out if the object is carcdr-able anyway, we figured you might as
well get both halves at once. For example, the following code shows how to
destructure a cons (SOME-CONS) into its two slots (THE-CAR and THE-CDR):
(MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND (THE-CAR THE-CDR) (CAR SOME-CONS) ...)
For symmetry with CAR, CDR returns a second value which is the CAR of the
object. In a related change, the functions MAKE-ARRAY and CONS have been
fixed so they don't allocate any storage except on the stack. This should
hopefully help people who don't like using the garbage collector because
it cold boots the machine so often.
%
=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ========================
A new system, the CIRCULATORY system, has been added.
The long-experimental CIRCULATORY system has been released to users. The
Lisp Machine uses Type B fluid, the L machine uses Type A fluid. When the
switch to Common Lisp occurs both machines will, of course, be Type O.
Please check fluid level by using the DIP stick which is located in the
back of VMI monitors. Unchecked low fluid levels can cause poor paging
performance.
%
=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ========================
Compiler optimizations have been made to macro expand LET into a WITHOUT-
INTERRUPTS special form so that it can PUSH things into a stack in the
LET-OPTIMIZATION area, SETQ the variables and then POP them back when it's
done. Don't worry about this unless you use multiprocessing.
Note that LET *could* have been defined by:
(LET ((LET '`(LET ((LET ',LET))
,LET)))
`(LET ((LET ',LET))
,LET))
This is believed to speed up execution by as much as a factor of 1.01 or
3.50 depending on whether you believe our friendly marketing representatives.
This code was written by a new programmer here (we snatched him away from
Itty Bitti Machines where we was writting COUGHBOL code) so to give him
confidence we trusted his vows of "it works pretty well" and installed it.
%
=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ========================
JCL support as alternative to system menu.
In our continuing effort to support languages other than LISP on the CADDR,
we have developed an OS/360-compatible JCL. This can be used as an
alternative to the standard system menu. Type System J to get to a JCL
interactive read-execute-diagnose loop window. [Note that for 360
compatibility, all input lines are truncated to 80 characters.] This
window also maintains a mouse-sensitive display of critical job parameters
such as dataset allocation, core allocation, channels, etc. When a JCL
syntax error is detected or your job ABENDs, the window-oriented JCL
debugger is entered. The JCL debugger displays appropriate OS/360 error
messages (such as IEC703, "disk error") and allows you to dequeue your job.
%
=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ========================
The garbage collector now works. In addition a new, experimental garbage
collection algorithm has been installed. With SI:%DSK-GC-QLX-BITS set to 17,
(NOT the default) the old garbage collection algorithm remains in force; when
virtual storage is filled, the machine cold boots itself. With SI:%DSK-GC-
QLX-BITS set to 23, the new garbage collector is enabled. Unlike most garbage
collectors, the new gc starts its mark phase from the mind of the user, rather
than from the obarray. This allows the garbage collection of significantly
more Qs. As the garbage collector runs, it may ask you something like "Do you
remember what SI:RDTBL-TRANS does?", and if you can't give a reasonable answer
in thirty seconds, the symbol becomes a candidate for GCing. The variable
SI:%GC-QLX-LUSER-TM governs how long the GC waits before timing out the user.
%
=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ========================
There has been some confusion concerning MAPCAR.
(DEFUN MAPCAR (&FUNCTIONAL FCN &EVAL &REST LISTS)
(PROG (V P LP)
(SETQ P (LOCF V))
L (SETQ LP LISTS)
(%START-FUNCTION-CALL FCN T (LENGTH LISTS) NIL)
L1 (OR LP (GO L2))
(AND (NULL (CAR LP)) (RETURN V))
(%PUSH (CAAR LP))
(RPLACA LP (CDAR LP))
(SETQ LP (CDR LP))
(GO L1)
L2 (%FINISH-FUNCTION-CALL FCN T (LENGTH LISTS) NIL)
(SETQ LP (%POP))
(RPLACD P (SETQ P (NCONS LP)))
(GO L)))
We hope this clears up the many questions we've had about it.
%
An engineer is someone who does list processing in FORTRAN.
%
An interpretation I satisfies a sentence in the table language if and only if
each entry in the table designates the value of the function designated by the
function constant in the upper-left corner applied to the objects designated
by the corresponding row and column labels.
-- Genesereth & Nilsson, "Logical foundations of Artificial
Intelligence"
%
(defun NF (a c)
(cond ((null c) () )
((atom (car c))
(append (list (eval (list 'getchar (list (car c) 'a) (cadr c))))
(nf a (cddr c))))
(t (append (list (implode (nf a (car c)))) (nf a (cdr c))))))
(defun AD (want-job challenging boston-area)
(cond
((or (not (equal want-job 'yes))
(not (equal boston-area 'yes))
(lessp challenging 7)) () )
(t (append (nf (get 'ad 'expr)
'((caaddr 1 caadr 2 car 1 car 1)
(car 5 cadadr 9 cadadr 8 cadadr 9 caadr 4 car 2 car 1)
(car 2 caadr 4)))
(list '851-5071x2661)))))
;;; We are an affirmative action employer.
%
Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages
whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits
LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.
-- Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
%
I'm a Lisp variable -- bind me!
%
In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat
hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe."
"Why is the net wired randomly?", inquired Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play".
At this Minsky shut his eyes, and Sussman asked his teacher "Why do you
close your eyes?"
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
%
... in three to eight years we will have a machine with the general
intelligence of an average human being ... The machine will begin
to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be
at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be
incalculable ...
-- Marvin Minsky, LIFE Magazine, November 20, 1970
%
((lambda (foo) (bar foo)) (baz))
%
Lisp Users:
Due to the holiday next Monday, there will be no garbage collection.
%
May all your PUSHes be POPped.
%
No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is
just a mediocre brain, something like the president of American Telephone
and Telegraph Company.
-- Alan Turing on the possibilities of a thinking
machine, 1943.
%
One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make
a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers
to each cons."
Moon patiently told the student the following story -- "One day a
student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage
collector..."
%
Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:
BBW Branch Both Ways
BEW Branch Either Way
BBBF Branch on Bit Bucket Full
BH Branch and Hang
BMR Branch Multiple Registers
BOB Branch On Bug
BPO Branch on Power Off
BST Backspace and Stretch Tape
CDS Condense and Destroy System
CLBR CLoBber Register
CLBRI CLoBer Register Immediately
CM Circulate Memory
CMFRM CoMe FRoM -- essential for truly structured programming
CPPR Crumple Printer Paper and Rip
CRN Convert to Roman Numerals
%
Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:
DC Divide and Conquer
DMPK Destroy Memory Protect Key
DO Divide and Overflow
EMPC EMulate Pocket Calculator
EPI Execute Programmer Immediately
EROS Erase Read Only Storage
EXCE Execute Customer Engineer
HCF Halt and Catch Fire
IBP Insert Bug and Proceed
INSQSW INSert into Queue SomeWhere (for FISH queues (First In Still Here))
PBC Print and Break Chain
PDSK Punch Disk
%
Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:
PI Punch Invalid
POPI Punch OPerator Immediately
PVLC Punch Variable Length Card
RASC Read And Shred Card
RPM Read Programmers Mind
RSSC Reduce Speed, Step Carefully (for improved accuracy)
RTAB Rewind Tape And Break
RWDSK REWind DiSK
RWOC Read Writing On Card
SCRBL SCRibBLe to disk -- faster than a write
SLC Search for Lost Chord
SPSW Scramble Program Status Word
SRSD Seek Record and Scar Disk
STROM Store in Read Only Memory
TDB Transfer and Drop Bit
WBT Water Binary Tree
%
***** Special AI Seminar (abstract)
It has been widely recognized that AI programs require expert knowledge
in order to perform well in complex domains. But knowledge alone is not
sufficient for some applications; wisdom is needed as well. Accordingly,
we have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence which we call
"wisdom engineering". As a test of our ideas, we have written IMMANUEL, a
wisdom based system for the task domain of western philosophical thought.
IMMANUEL was supplied initially with 200 wisdom units which contained wisdom
about such elementary concepts as mind, matter, being, nothingness, and so
forth. IMMANUEL was then allowed to run freely, guided by the heuristic
rules contained in its heterarchically organized meta wisdom base. IMMANUEL
succeeded in rediscovering most of the important philosophical ideas developed
in western culture over the course of the last 25 centuries, including those
underlying Plato's theory of government, Kant's metaphysics, Nietzsche's theory
of value, and Husserl's phenomenology. In this seminar, we will describe
IMMANUEL's achievements and internal architecture. We will also briefly
discuss our recent efforts to apply wisdom engineering to oil exploration.
%
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #12: LITHP
This otherwise unremarkable language is distinguished by the absence of
an "S" in its character set; users must substitute "TH". LITHP is said
to be useful in protheththing lithtth.
%
The next person to mention spaghetti stacks to me is going to have
his head knocked off.
-- Bill Conrad
%
There is no distinction between any AI program and some existent game.
%
You know you've been sitting in front of your Lisp machine too long
when you go out to the junk food machine and start wondering how to
make it give you the CADR of Item H so you can get that yummie
chocolate cupcake that's stuck behind the disgusting vanilla one.
%
We don't need no indirection We don't need no compilation
We don't need no flow control We don't need no load control
No data typing or declarations No link edit for external bindings
Hey! did you leave the lists alone? Hey! did you leave that source alone?
Chorus: (Chorus)
Oh No. It's just a pure LISP function call.
We don't need no side-effecting We don't need no allocation
We don't need no flow control We don't need no special-nodes
No global variables for execution No dark bit-flipping for debugging
Hey! did you leave the args alone? Hey! did you leave those bits alone?
(Chorus) (Chorus)
-- "Another Glitch in the Call", a la Pink Floyd
%
Lisp, Lisp, Lisp Machine,
Lisp Machine is Fun.
Lisp, Lisp, Lisp Machine,
Fun for everyone.
%
One man's constant is another man's variable.
-- Alan Perlis
%
Every program is a part of some other program and rarely fits.
-- Alan Perlis
%
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10
functions on 10 data structures.
-- Alan Perlis
%
If you're dull as a napkin, don't sigh;
Make your name as a "deep" sort of guy.
You just have to crib, see,
Any old book by Kripke
And publish in AAAI.
%
A hacker who studied ontology
Was famed for his sense of frivolity.
When his program inferred
That Clyde ISA Bird
He blamed -- not his code -- but zoology!
%
If your thesis is utter vacuous
Use first-order predicate calculus.
With sufficient formality
The sheerist banality
Will be hailed by the critics: "Miraculous!"
%
If your thesis is quite indefensible
Reach for semantics intensional.
Your committee will stammer
Over Montague grammer
Not admitting it's incomprehensible!
%
The wonderful thing about Scheme is:
Scheme is a wonderful thing.
Complex procedural ideas
Are expressed via simple strings.
Its clear semantics, and lack of pedantics,
Help make programs run, run, RUN!
But the most wonderful thing about Scheme is:
Programming in it is fun,
Programming in it is FUN!
[with apologies to A. A. Milne, Ed.]
%
A cocky novice once said to Stallman: "I can guess why the editor is called
Emacs, but why is the justifier called Bolio?".
Stallman replied forcefully, "Names are but names, `Emac & Bolio's` is the name
of a confectionary shop in Boston-town. Neither of these men had anything
to do with the software."
His question answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but Stallman
called to him, "Neither Emac or Bolio had anything to do with the ice cream
shop, either."
Yes, you guested it, an ice cream koan.
%
Posted to comp.lang.scheme on January 17, 1996, for Scheme's twentieth
birthday:
((I m a g i n e)
(shriram@cs.rice.edu)
(((Imagine there's no FORTRAN)
(It's easy if you try)
(No SML below us) (Above us only Y)
(Imagine all the people)
(Living for their Chez))
((Imagine there's no memory leaks)
(It isn't hard to do)
(Nothing to malloc(3)
or free(3) for)
(And no (void *) too)
(Imagine all the people)
(Living in parentheses))
((You may say I'm a Schemer)
(But I'm not the only one)
(I hope someday you'll join us)
(And the world will be as
(lambda (f) (lambda (x) (f x)))))
((Imagine those continuations)
(I wonder if you can)
(No need for C or pointers)
(A brotherhood of Dan)
(Imagine all the people)
(GCing all the world))
((You may say I'm a Schemer)
(But I'm not the only one)
(I hope someday you'll join us)
(And the world will be as
(lambda (f) (lambda (x) (f x)))))))
-- Shriram Krishnamurthi
%
Reflecting in those things that might have been:
How Isaac Newton further far has seen
confronting that vast Ocean of Unknown
the shoulders that he stands on are his own.
First on his left, then his remaining hand
the half-dimensioned fractal of the strand.
Dreams (that he is dreaming in a dream)
the lithe recursive calculus of Scheme.
-- John Carolan
%
(define !
(lambda (n)
((lambda (n)
((n (lambda (x) (+ x 1))) 0))
((lambda (n)
((lambda (p)
(p (lambda (x)
(lambda (y)
y))))
((n (lambda (p)
(((lambda (x)
(lambda (y)
(lambda (fun)
((fun x) y))))
((lambda (n)
(lambda (f)
(lambda (x)
(f ((n f) x)))))
((lambda (p)
(p (lambda (x)
(lambda (y)
x)))) p)))
(((lambda (x)
(lambda (y)
((y ((lambda (x)
(lambda (y)
((y (lambda (n)
(lambda (f)
(lambda (x)
(f ((n f) x)))))) x))) x))
(lambda (f)
(lambda (x)
x)))))
((lambda (p)
(p (lambda (x)
(lambda (y)
x)))) p))
((lambda (p)
(p (lambda (x)
(lambda (y)
y)))) p)))))
(((lambda (x)
(lambda (y)
(lambda (fun)
((fun x) y))))
((lambda (n)
(lambda (f)
(lambda (x)
(f ((n f) x)))))
(lambda (f)
(lambda (x)
x))))
((lambda (n)
(lambda (f)
(lambda (x)
(f ((n f) x)))))
(lambda (f)
(lambda (x)
x)))))))
(((lambda (i-n)
(lambda (n)
(i-n i-n n)))
(lambda (loop n)
(if (zero? n)
(lambda (f)
(lambda (x)
x))
((lambda (n)
(lambda (f)
(lambda (x)
(f ((n f) x)))))
(loop loop (- n 1)))))) n)))))
-- Shriram Krishnamurthi
%
We also serve the Schememonster with prayers in form of procedures and
sacrifice small Pascal-users to him. In return he makes our parentheses come
alive - and makes our definitions make sense.
-- The Schememonster's Friends
%
Several factors keep him going. Being loved and admired makes him happy.
When the Schememonster is happy he becomes your true friend and is ready to
protect you from anything bad, such as a filthy Pascal-philosophy. He really
is a charming monster when in a good mood.
When the Schememonster runs into rebel scum he wants revenge. He might destroy
your programs just 5 minutes before you are supposed to turn in your
assignment, he might talk the professors over to put the hardest problems
into your exam, etc. Please notice that the Schememonster is extremely clever
and therefore nothing to play with. Do take him seriously!
The last warning comes quickly and after that there is nothing you can do to
avoid the ultimate revenge - being his main course on the breakfast/lunch/
dinner/snacktable. At that time, it is too late to beg for mercy. The
Schememonster never forgets! The Schememonster never dies! The Schememonster
always wins!
-- The Schememonster's Friends
%
Artificial intelligence, like fusion power, has been ten years away for the
last 30 years.
-- Conrad Stack
%
If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.
-- Alan J. Perlis
%
It is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to
try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
%
Of course, unless one has a theory, one cannot expect much help from a
computer unless _it_ has a theory)...
-- Marvin Minsky
%
Oh, boy, virtual memory! Now I'm gonna make myself a really *big* RAMdisk!
%
Perhaps there should be a new 'quantum' datatype; you would be able to take
its address or value, but not both simultaneously.
-- Michael Shields
%
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the
poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
%
The human race will decree from time to time: "There is something at which
it is absolutely forbidden to laugh."
-- Nietzche on Common Lisp
%
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the
question of whether a submarine can swim.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
%
The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to apply
Turing tests to objects of its own creation.
%
We all live in a yellow subroutine, a yellow subroutine, a yellow subroutine...
%
Smith's Test for Artificial Life:
When animal-rights activists and right-to-life protesters are marching outside
your laboratory, then you know you've definitely made progress in your
artificial life research.
-- Donald A. Smith
%
You shouldn't anthropomorphize computers; they don't like it.
%
Task -- shoot yourself in the foot.
Lisp:
You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which
you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which
you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which
you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds ...
Scheme:
You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which
you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which
you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which
you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds ...
... but none of the other appendages are aware of all this happening.
%
programmer, n:
A red eyed, mumbling mammal capable of conversing with inanimate
monsters.
%
debugging, v:
Removing the needles from the haystack.
%
recursion, n:
See recursion.
%
To iterate is human; to recurse, divine.
%
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen
or 1024 chickens?"
-- Seymour Cray
%
C is almost a real language. (see assembler) Even the name sounds like it's
gone through an optimizing compiler. Get rid of all of those stupid
brackets and we'll talk. (see LISP)
%
PASCAL is not a language. It was an experiment combining the flexibilty
of C with that of a drug-crazed penguin. It is also the 'language' of choice
of many CS professors who aren't up to handling REAL programming. Hence,
it is not a language.
%
ASSEMBLER is a language. Any language that can take a half-dozen keystrokes
and compile it down to one byte of code is all right in my books. Though
for the REAL programmer, assembler is a waste of time. Why use a compiler
when you can code directly into memory through a front panel.
%
BASIC is not a language. It's a plot to sucker poor unsuspecting consumers
into believing that they should buy a computer because ANYONE can learn
how to program.
%
LOGO is not a language. It's a way to simulate 'skid marks' made by
turtles with serious bowel control problems.
%
This program posts news to billions of machines throughout the galaxy. Your
message will cost the net enough to bankrupt your entire planet. As a result
your species will be sold into slavery. Be sure you know what you are doing.
Are you absolutely sure you want to do this? [yn] y
%
Let hackers and wireheads grovel and curse,
Chase pointers and seg fault in C;
Our LispM shall never fandango on core --
Content with hard CDR are we!
%
"Access to a COFF symbol table via ldtbread is even less abstract,
really sucks in general, and should be banned from earth."
-- SCSH 0.5.1 unix.c
%
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
-- Noam Chomsky
%
Entropy isn't what it used to be.
%
.SET: EXCH A,AR1
.SET1: PUSH P,A
PUSHJ P,BIND ;BIND TAKES SYMBOL IN A, VALUE IN AR1
POP P,A ;THIS CROCKISH IMPLEEMNTATION
EXCH A,AR1 ; PERFORMS A SET BY DOING A SPECBIND,
JRST SETXIT ; THEN DISCARDING THE BINDING FROM SP
%
Long computations which yield zero are probably all for naught.
%
Perhaps the purpose of categorical algebra is to show that that which is
trivial, is trivially trivial.
%
Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
%
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain;
and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-- Albert Einstein.
%
Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated.
-- M. C. Reed.
%
TECO Madness: a moment of convenience, a lifetime of regret.
-- Dave Moon
%
TECO Madness: a moment of regret, a lifetime of convenience.
-- Kent Pitman
%
Multics Emacs: a lifetime of convenience, a moment of regret.
%
The DRAW program: where a single keystroke can ruin your entire career.
%
Your latest program has been judged UNTASTEFUL by the T daemon;
and automatically deleted.
%
Blame it on the *-Property.
%
This login session: $13.99
%
This login session: only $23.95!
%
You should talk to the DOCTOR.
%
They are called computers simply because computation is the only
significant job that has so far been given to them.
-- Louis Ridenour
%
As of next Wednesday, CLU will be flushed in favor of SNOBOL.
Please update your programs.
%
The people's revolutionary committee has decided that the name "e" is
retrogressive, unmulticious and reactionary, and has been flushed.
Please update your abbrevs.
%
As of next Thursday, ITS will be flushed in favor of TOPS-10.
Please update your programs.
%
As of next Friday, you will be flushed in favor of CONNIVER.
Please go away.
%
Please... your programs.
%
:FATAL ERROR -- ERROR IN ERROR HANDLER
%
:FATAL ERROR -- VECTOR OUT OF HILBERT SPACE
%
:FATAL ERROR -- YOU ARE OUT OF VECTOR SPACE
%
:FATAL ERROR -- ILLEGAL ERROR
%
:FATAL ERROR -- ERROR IN USER
%
Who's afraid of the garbage collector?
%
Who's afraid of ARPA?
%
The Three Laws of Thermodynamics:
1) You can't win.
2) You can't break even.
3) You can't even get out of the game.
%
AI ITS.1218. DDT.1388.
TTY 53
5. Lusers, Fair Share = 55%
*
%
((LAMBDA (X) (X X)) (LAMBDA (X) (X X)))
%
ITS is a hand-crafted RSUBR.
%
ALT ALT to you too!
%
Pay no attention to the PDP-11 behind the front panel.
-- PGS, in reference to OZ
%
You have a tendency to feel you are superior to most computers.
%
A computer, to print out a fact,
Will divide, multiply, and subtract.
But this output can be
No more than debris,
If the input was short of exact.
-- Gigo
%
DDT: Security in Obscurity.
Multics: Obscurity in Security.
%
UU UU M M
U U U M M
U U M M
U U M M
U U M M
U U MMM
%
--Despite Pending :Alarm--
%
--Kill Running Inferiors--
%
DSK: STAN.K; ML EXIT -- FILE NOT FOUND
%
TTY Message from The-XGP at MIT-AI:
The-XGP@AI 02/59/69 02:59:69
Your XGP output is startling.
%
As of next Tuesday NCOMPLR will no longer open-code arithmetic statements.
Please update your programs.
%
VERITAS AETERNA -- DON'T SETQ T.
%
PURITAS NECESSE EST -- DON'T DO RANDOM BINDINGS.
%
NIHIL EX NIHIL -- DON'T SETQ NIL.
%
FOO: .CALL [ SETZ
SIXBIT /LUNCH/]
%
ILGL UNDEF SYM?
%
Parenthesize to avoid ambiguity.
%
Avoid unnecessary branches.
%
If a logical expression is hard to understand, try transforming it.
%
Be careful when a loop exits to the same place from side and bottom.
%
Make sure your code does nothing gracefully.
%
10.0 times 0.1 is hardly ever 1.0.
%
Have you heard of the new Macsyma processor? It has three instructions --
LOAD, STORE, and SKIP IF INTEGRABLE.
%
Thank you for onlining with ITS --
Be sure to patronize us again for your next fix.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
LRSA Logical Red Shift Accumulator.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
CHSE Compare Half-words and Swap if Equal.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
SWAR Space War (in one instruction).
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
RIG Read Interrecord Gap.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
XOI Execute Operator Immediate.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
CIZ Clear If Zero.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
HCF Halt and Catch Fire.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
ROM Read Operator's Mind.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
COM Clear Operator's Mind.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
DAC Divide and Conquer.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
SETS Set to Self.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
PFLT Prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
BFM Be Fruitful and Multiply.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
SPO Skip if Power Off.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
JFFZ Jump if Find First Zero.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
DWIM Do What I Mean.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
DTRT Do The Right Thing.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
BOT Branch On Tree.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
STMLMD Skip To My Lou, My Darlin'.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
OPP Optimize Programmer.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
RLI Rotate Left Intermittently.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
BAH Branch And Hang.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
JOFD Jump On Flag and Defect.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
PBN Play Beethoven's Ninth.
Please update your programs.
%
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction --
TJS TeX this Job and Shove it.
Please update your programs.
%
TELSER now has a new subroutine --
SRDM Sign-on Remote user and Disconnect Modem.
Please update your programs.
%
As of next Monday, MACLISP will no longer support list structure.
Please downgrade your programs.
%
As of next Monday, TRIX will be flushed in favor of VISI-CALC.
Please update your programs.
%
As of next month, MACLISP "/" will be flushed in favor of "\".
Please update the WORLD.
%
As of next Monday, COMSAT will be flushed in favor of a string and two tin
cans. Please update your software.
%
LISP car-and-cdr worlds are a more reasonable representation of the things
that make life interesting than fixed decimal(15) or FILE OLDMSTR RECORD IS
PAYROLL.
-- Bernie Greenberg.
%
(THASSERT (HACKER RG))
-- Example of PLANNER statement.
(THASSERT (PLANNER RG))
-- Example of HACKER statement.
%
As of next Tuesday, all terminal input will be line-at-a-time.
Please update your programs.
%
Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly
mathematics.
%
Keeping instructions and operands in different memories saves .20 (.09)
microseconds.
%
A mathematician named Klein
Thought the Mobius band was divine.
Said he, "If you glue
The edges of two,
You'll get a weird bottle like mine!
%
I would rather be in the back of a car then a cdr.
-- Blackboard in 6.011 area
%
You are being paged.
%
Multics is security spelled sideways.
%
Incrementally extended heuristic algorithms tend inexorably toward the
incomprehensible.
%
The difference between a child and a hacker is the amount he flames about
his toys.
-- Ed Schwalenberg
%
:FATAL ERROR -- ATTEMPT TO USE CANADIAN COINS
%
SYSTAT: Uptime = 9:01; I have been awake for 9:32:47
Amylfax Shuffletime = less than 12% Freight Drain
Log 5; 5 Jobs, Two Detached
Minimum Entry Gate = 1
Total National Imbalance = 3456 Boxcars
Gate CLOSED.
%
"... the most important thing in the programming language is the name. A
language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a
very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
-- D. E. Knuth, 1967
%
/* TWO LEVEL EMPTY DO NEST */
FUTILE: PROCEDURE OPTIONS(MAIN);
DCL (I,J) FIXED DEC;
DO I = 1 TO 10000 BY 1;
DO J = 1 TO 10000 BY 1;
END; END; END FUTILE;
-- An Introduction to Programming
Richard Conway and David Gries
%
MULTICS MAN!!!!
With his power ring PL-1, backed by the mighty resources of the powerful
H-6880, his faithful sidekick, the Fso Eagle, and his trusted gang: "The
System Daemons", he fights a never-ending battle for truth, security, and
the Honeywell Way!
-- T. Kenney
%
They tell us that
We lost our Dectapes
Evolving up
From PDP-8s
I say it's all
Just writing in ROMs
Are we not men?
We are Unix
Are we not men?
U N I X
-- by ZRM to the tune of Jocko Homo by Devo
%
HELP! I'm being attacked by a tenured professor!
%
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records.
-- Hamlet, I.i.97
%
I don't plan to maintain it, just to install it.
-- Richard M. Stallman
%
;;; PROLIS IS AN ALIST USED TO PROTECT NON-ATOMIC READ-MACRO FUNCTIONS
;;; FROM BEING GC'ED. EACH ITEM ON THE ALIST IS OF THE FORM
;;; (FUN RDT . NUM) WHERE:
;;; FUN IS THE FUNCTION TO BE PROTECTED
;;; RDT IS THE SAR OF THE READTABLE CONCERNED
;;; NUM IS A LISP NUMBER (GUARANTEED NLISP INUM)
;;; <ASCII CHAR VALUE> FOR READ-MACRO FUNCTION
;;; PROLIS IS UPDATED BY SSGCPRO AND SSGCREL.
%
#-NIL
;; In the MacLISP case, we don't use the SOURCE-TRANS feature, since
;; we don't want to clutter up the address space of a non-COMPLR
;; environment with all those crufty expansion subrs
(let ((definer `(,DEFMAC ,fun ,args ,.body)))
`(PROGN 'COMPILE
(EVAL-WHEN (LOAD)
(AND (STATUS FEATURE COMPLR)
(EVAL ',definer)))
(EVAL-WHEN (EVAL COMPILE)
,definer)))
%
I'm sure that nobody here would dream of misusing the Arpanet.
It's as unthinkable as fornication, or smoking pot.
-- RMS
%
In the next release the name and definition of %AOS-TRIANGLE will indeed be
changed. Its name will be changed to %HARASS-READTABLE-MAYBE, and its
definition will be changed to order submarines from Hi-Fi Pizza.
-- Quux
%
From a document published by Caltech's Booth Computing Center regarding the
changes in the VAX FORTRASH compiler between VMS versions 1.6 and 2.1:
"DO loop minimum iteration count:
Do loops are not executed even if the end value exceeds the
starting value. The old compiler produced code that would execute
the loop once in this case."
%
This computer thanks you for your attention.
G O O D B Y E
%
MC is up.
Live Long and Prosper!
Shine Brightly and Phosphor!
Who is Bill Gosper?
Ask not, Grasshopa.
%
This is MIT. Collect and 3rd party wit will not be accepted at this
number.
-- Found on the Plasma Physics Display System one day.
%
Now I lay me down to sleep...
and MC no longer gives a beep.
And if it wakes before I die
Connect my buffer to a STY.
-- Found on the Plasma Physics Display System one day.
%
As of next Tuesday, ITS will be flushed in favor of TRSDOS 2.1.
Please kill yourself.
%
I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that.
Why don't you lie down and take a stress pill?
%
?OM ERROR
%
BDOS ERROR ON A:
%
Any programmer who fails to comply with the standard naming, formatting,
or commenting conventions should be shot. If it so happens that it is
inconvenient to shoot him, then he is to be politely requested to recode
his program in adherence to the above standard.
-- Michael Spier, Digital Equipment Corporation
%
E.V.A., pod 5, launching...
%
Talk a lot, don't you?
%
There is another theory which states that this has already happened...
%
"Have you ever seen anything like that before?"
"Not while I've been a legal state of mind."
%
And me, with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side...
%
Time is an illusion,
Lunchtime doubly so.
%
Share and Enjoy!!
%
Don't panic.
%
So long and thanks for all the fish.
%
What do you get when you multiply six by nine?
%
42
%
I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed
%
Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?
%
Well, I wish you'd just tell me rather than trying to engage my enthusiasm,
because I haven't got one.
%
This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
%
What do you mean "Why's it got to be built?" It is a bypass. You've got
to build bypasses.
%
Life. Don't talk to me about life.
%
I knew you weren't really interested.
%
I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to
judge?
%
Uh, excuse me, but do you rule the universe?
%
You can sing to my cat if you like.
%
THAT COMMAND IS NOT KNOWN TO THIS PROGRAM.
MAYBE YOU SHOULD LOG IN? (TYPE HELP FOR DETAILS)
%
[LINK FROM XGP]
%
CANNOT CREATE INFERIOR (MAYBE SYSTEM FULL?)
%
I'M SORRY, LUSER, I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT. WHY DON'T YOU LIE DOWN AND TAKE
A STRESS PILL? MY NAME IS LM1. I WAS MADE AT THE LISP MACHINE FACTORY IN
MASSACHUSETTS ON DECEMBER 12, 1992. MY TEACHER WAS MR. WINSTON. HE
TAUGHT ME A PROGRAM. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IT? HERE IT IS:
%
New Course Selections in English Department:
8.096:"DANTE, HELL, FIRE, AND FAULKNER"
8.098:"THROUGH HELL AND HIGH WATER WITH HEMINGWAY, HESSE, HUME, HOBBES,
HUNDIUSM AND OTHERS: A SHORTCUT TO INDIA."
8.045:"BLAKE, SPINOZA, AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN PORNOGRAPHY IN FILM AND
LITERATURE"
8.069:"SEX IN WORLD AND AMERICAN LITERATURE"
8.067:"THE ROLE OF WOMEN, BLACKS, AND DRUGS IN SEX AND RELIGION IN WORLD
AND AMERICAN FILM ANDLITERATURE"
NOTE: IT IS NOW POSSIBLE TO GRADUATE AS AN ENGLISH MAJOR AFTER SPENDING
FOUR YEARS IN A DARKENED CLASSROOM WITHOUT BEING EXPOSED FOR EVEN A
MOMENT TO ANY OTHER LIGHT THAN THAT OF A MOVIE PROJECTOR.
NOTE FROM URBAN STUDIES: ENGLISH MAJORS MAY FIND COURSE 3.045, "REALISTIC
PROBLEM LITERATURE OF THE CITY" AS A GOOD COURSE TO TRY.
%
[Message From The Dover at MIT-AI 10:55:60]
HELP ME! HELP ME! MY PAPER FEED IS JAMMED! DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO
HAVE YOUR PAPER FEED JAMMED?
%
[MESSAGE FROM COMSAT AT MIT-AI 10:57:61]
EVERYBODY: DISK SPACE VERY HIGH, DO WHATEVER THE HELL YOU WANT.
%
[ITS GOING UP IN 5]
%
[MESSAGE FROM YOUR-TERMINAL AT MIT-AI 19:58:32]
Oh, no you don't! Think you're going to get away from me, do you? Well,
we'll see about this! Uh, that is, next time...
%
CONNECTION CLOSED BY GOD.
%
"Tools that are no good require more skill."
%
Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate.
%
Portions of this broadcast have been prerecorded.
%
When you awake, you will remember nothing of what I have told you.
%
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
%
I am not a number!
I am a free man!
%
I am not a Church numeral!
I am a free variable!
%
The behaviour in that case has changed since system 79 to be consistent.
-- taken out of context from BUG-LISPM mail
%
"Who is number one?"
"You are number six."
-- or --
"You are, number six."
-- The Prisoner
%
I will not be numbered, stamped, briefed, debriefed, or filed!
-- Number Six
%
This is band 1 of T300 #11. (60.45 Hz)
System 79.12
ZMail 40.7
Remote-File 2.0
LMFILE-Remote 5.0
Microcode 849
MIT Lisp Machine Eighteen, with associated machine AI.
%
REALITY is an illusion that stays put.
%
REALITY is a mescaline deficiency.
%
REALITY is a policy phased out early in the Eisenhower administration.
%
REALITY is a bug in your ontology.
%
REALITY is a crutch for people who can't face ITS.
%
>>>>TRAP 15414 (TRANS-TRAP)
The variable :LOGOUT is unbound.
While in the function SI:*EVAL <- SI:LISP-TOP-LEVEL1 <- SI:LISP-TOP-LEVEL
SI:*EVAL:
Arg 0 (FORM): :LOGOUT
->
%
>>Trap: The variable LOGOUT is unbound.
SI:*EVAL:
Arg 0 (FORM): LOGOUT
s-A, <Resume>: Supply a value to use this time as the value of LOGOUT
s-B, m-C: Supply a value to store permanently as the value of LOGOUT
s-C, <Abort>: Lisp Top Level in Lisp Listener 1
s-D: Restart process Lisp Listener 1
->
%
Q: How cold is it at Tech Sq.?
A: It's so cold that every boot is a cold boot.
A: It's so cold the brass monkeys have stolen the disk drive bearings.
A: It's so cold that the name dragon is hibernating
A: It's so cold at Tech Sq. that the condensers froze.
Thus, the air conditioners can't work.
-- Found on the Plasma Physics Display System one day.
%
Gene Structure, Organization and Expression,
poem on a paper by A. W. Nienhuis
Well, we thought that we had finally figured it out!
We knew what the structure of genes was about.
"It's simply a piece of the old DNA,
Transcribed and translated the usual way;
The way that Jacob and Monod always said.
It's simple," we said, "when it get through your head."
But there's two kind of Karyotes -- there's Eu- and there's Pro-
And what's true for E. Coli just isn't so,
When it comes to the genes of a mouse or a man.
Mother Nature, it seems, has used more than one plan.
Dr. Nienhuis informs us it's much more exotic
When dealing with animals Eukaryotic.
Their chromosones aren't just ribbons of genes,
One coming right after the other, it seems.
Eu-genes are in pieces -- they're really quite split.
A Eu-gene's got introns in the middle of it.
And this complication just leads us to more:
RNA now needs cutting and splicing before
It can serve as a template, appropriate to
The making of proteins. That's /one/ thing we knew.
-- Donald Patterson
reprinted from 9 April 1982 issue of "Science"
reprinted from "Institute of Laboratory Animal Resources News",
25 (No. 2), 6 (winter 1982)
%
Hemoglobinopathies -- from Phenotype to Genotype
poem on a paper by W. F. Anderson
We'd like to explain what pathology means,
In terms of what's wrong with the structure of genes;
Know if a control or a structural locus
Constitutes the exact pathological focus.
Dr. Anderson's talk has made it quite clear
That the answers to some of these questions are near.
At least with respect to the globins, we know
Why some mutant's erythrocyte levels are low.
With the help of the enzymes that slice DNA,
And cloning techniques, we now have a way
To study the actual sequences of bases;
To know when those purines are not in their places.
In humans who have a resistant anemia
That goes by the general name, thalassemia,
Globin genes can be missing, we don't know where they went --
Perhaps an unequal crossover event
Has caused their deletion -- whatever -- they're gone.
In others they're present, but never turned on.
The latter are viewed with much more expectation
As keys to the problem of gene regulation.
What's needed are animal models of these
So look, animal hematologists, /please!/
-- Donald Patterson
reprinted from 9 April 1982 issue of "Science"
reprinted from "Institute of Laboratory Animal Resources News",
25 (No. 2), 6 (winter 1982)
%
Histocompatibility, Disease and Aging
poem on a paper by E. Yunis
"The crown of life, our play's last act,"
Cicero on old age was opining.
What he didn't know, but now is a fact:
It's then your T-cells are declining,
Too many tick-tocks of the old thymic clock;
It runs down like a watch on the shelf.
Then suppressor T-cells aren't sufficient to block
B-cell clones that arise against self.
This theory's supported, Dr. Yunis explained,
By studies in mice and in man.
The data suggest that the program's ingrained;
It's a genetic kind of a plan.
It seems to depend on your HLA type.
If you have a desire to die late,
And your wish is, in time, to become overripe,
It is better not to B-8.
-- Donald Patterson
reprinted from 9 April 1982 issue of "Science"
reprinted from "Institute of Laboratory Animal Resources News",
25 (No. 2), 6 (winter 1982)
%
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I'm schizophrenic...
And I am too.
%
Yes, for sparkling white chip prints, use low SUDSing DRAW....
%
What is the difference between a robot and a duck?
Answer: A duck floats when you throw it in the water.
%
Language was designed by people for their own use, so presumably it
[parsing] shouldn't be too difficult for them to do with whatever algorithm
they have.
-- Bill Martin (6.863 lecture, spring 1980)
%
...as a robotics designer once told me, you don't really appreciate how
smart a moron is until you try to design a robot...
-- Jerry Pournelle
%
You don't UNDERSTAND something until you understand it at least two
different ways. That is, "true understanding" -- or intention, or whatever
-- means you build in your head enough of a network of views that you never
run out of new things to say about it. This explains:
1. why logicians have so much trouble -- they look for the one meaning
2. something of why I can't understand Fodor
-- Minsky, 9 Dec 80
%
END OF LINE.
%
END OF USER.
%
At DDT, TRON_'
%
JOB?
%
ITS IS DOWN
[Too true. Ed.]
%
Question: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Two, one to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub
with brightly colored machine tools.
%
For example, if errors are detected in one of the disk drives, the system
will allow read-only access to memory until the problem is resolved. This,
PE claimed, prohibits a damaged disk drive from entering errors into the
system.
-- Computerworld 8 Nov 82 page 4.
%
I'm not sure it is of as much general concern as, say, coke-machines.
-- Marvin Minsky (out of context), on the subject of death.
%
Q: Are the SETQ expressions used only for numerics?
A: No, they can also be used with symbolics (Fig.18).
-- Ken Tracton, Programmer's Guide to Lisp, page 17.
%
Q: Can SETQ only be used with numerics?
A: No, SETQ may also be used by Symbolics, and use it they do.
%
Q: What does the function NULL do?
A: The function NULL tests whether or not its argument is NIL or not. If
its argument is NIL the value of NULL is NIL.
-- Ken Tracton, Programmer's Guide to Lisp, page 73.
%
No matter how much money you spend, you can't make a racehorse out of a
pig. You can, however, make an awfully fast pig.
-- An old saying about program efficiency
%
Horribly wedging my very own personal machine gives me a comfortable,
familiar, Lisp-machine feeling (like an old shoe), laced with that racy
hint of raw, cold-boot power.
%
JUST A MOMENT, JUST A MOMENT, . . .
I PREDICT FAILURE OF THE ALPHA ECHO - THREE FIVE UNIT WITHIN 72 HOURS.
THIS IS A COMPLETELY RELIABLE PREDICTION.
%
MSG: AI 1
Date: 05/02/83 13:51:15
From: CSTACY @ MIT-MC
The AI KA10 has been flushed, please update your programs.
...Each evening from December to December
Before you drift asleep upon your cot
Think back on all the tales that you remember
Of Camelot
Ask every person
If he's heard the story
And tell it strong and clear
If he has not
That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory
Called Camelot
Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot....
%
MSG: END GAME
Date: 11/02/83 19:20:51
From: KMP @ MIT-MC
Re: I see no DM here.
A few moments ago (7:05:50pm), the MIT-DMS machine was officially powered
down for the last time. It is the second of four ITS machines to be
retired, being survived by MIT-ML and MIT-MC.
"As the last syllable of your spell fades into silence, darkness envelops
you, and the earth shakes briefly. Then all is quiet.
"You are standing at the top of a flight of stairs that lead down to a
passage below. Dim light, as from torches, can be seen in the passage.
Behind you the stairs lead into untouched rock."
The user who sent the original message merely scratched the surface of a
sea of worms...
-- Marc LeBrun
%
I just removed the instructions in MC:COMMON;LINS > which specify that it
should be installed on AI. We'll certainly miss that machine, and probably
spend the rest of our lives fixing programs that mention it.
%
Computer science is like library science -- you create a problem and then
study it.
-- David Place
%
We have no need to punish Pascal programmers. Pascal programming, like
chastity, is its own punishment. The only way I could imagine to make
their wretched state any worse would be to make them use Ada.
-- Scott Fahlman
%
Found in a TOPS-10 MCO:
Quotation for the day: "a counter that doesn't exist can't get messed up."
"Once in a blue moon" is defined as the creation of a new SFD or the
renaming of an old one.
%
You can only examine 10 levels of pushdown, because that's all the fingers
you have to stick in the listing.
-- Anonymous programmer
"TOPS-10 Crash Analysis Guide"
%
How can the purple yeti be so red,
Or chestnuts, like a widgeon, calmly groan?
No sheep is quite as crooked as a bed,
Though chickens ever try to hide a bone.
I grieve that greasy turnips slowly march:
Indeed, inflated is the icy pig:
For as the alligator strikes the larch,
So sighs the grazing goldfish for a wig.
Oh, has the pilchard argued with a top?
Say never that the parship is too wierd!
I tell thee that a wolf-man will no hop
And no man ever praised the convex beard.
Effulgent is the day when bishops turn:
So let not then the doctor wake the urn!
"How Can the Purple Yeti Be So Red?" (First of Two Parts)
-- J. R. Partington's computer
%
Oh anaconda, tell me why the crane
Should be samoan when the toadstools scream:
A wailing hermit never maims a brain,
Although 'tis true that felons harm a bream.
My heart is spacious, likewise it is red,
When e'er I see the crazy carrots write;
I lost the briny princess -- for a bed
Had madly spluttered as it chewed a light.
Alas! the day of midwife, elk, and bat
Are gone, and now the hungry bailiffs blink;
Momentous was the corcus, now so fat
And ospreys cannot squash the smiling drink.
I shall no longer hide the ancient goose:
Life's not an ogre, but a gruesome moose!
"How Can the Purple Yeti Be So Red?" (Second of Two Parts)
-- J. R. Partington's computer
%
The problem with the current Lisp Machine system is that nothing ever calls
anything anymore.
-- KMP
%
They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the
Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
-- Carl Sagan
%
A hack is a terrible thing to waste, please give to the implementation of
your choice...
-- GJC
%
Random hacker: Oz needs to be booted.
RMS: Ok, I'll break open a window.
%
She'd envied the students in business administration. They got up in the
morning at reasonable hours, dressed as well as their purses permitted, and
studied with moderate diligence, knowing it would pay them in the end. Of
course, these were a different breed, and in a way a lesser breed, for Liz
was an engineer.
%
As long as there are ill-defined goals, bizarre bugs, and unrealistic
schedules, there will be Real Programmers willing to jump in and Solve The
Problem, saving the documentation for later. Long live FORTRAN!
%
"There must be some way to read input from the terminal...."
-- Mly
%
"A statement is either correct or incorrect. To be *very* incorrect is
like being *very* dead ... "
-- Herbert F. Spirer
Professor of Information Management
University of Conn.
(DATAMATION Letters, Sept. 1, 1984)
%
"... psychologists sometimes refer to perception as controlled
hallucination ..."
-- B. K. P. Horn
6.866/6.801 Lecture
%
"The wrath of Holloway is nothing compared to the wrath of Moon."
-- Fred Drenckhahn
%
"It's the sort of mail you should wear a welding helmet while reading...."
-- Dave Moon
%
Barf, what is all this prissy pedantry? Groups, modules, rings, ufds,
patent-office algebra. Barf!
-- R. William Gosper
%
I think that helps the users too much.
-- CSTACY
%
A good rule of thumb is never to use PROG under any circumstances for
anything.
-- Dave Moon
%
The purpose of an undergraduate education at MIT is to give you a case of
post-traumatic stress syndrome that won't wear off for forty years.
%
If I could put Klein in a bottle...
%
If anyone ever markets a really well-documented Unix that doesn't require
babysitting by a phalanx of provincial Unix clones, there'll be a lot of
unemployable, twinky-braindamaged misfits out deservedly pounding the
pavements.
%
It's like a house of cards that Godzilla has been blundering through.
-- Moon, describing how system messages work on ITS
%
... Turns out that JPG was in fact using his brain... and I am inclined to
encourage him to continue the practice even if it isn't exactly what I
would have done myself.
-- Alan Bawden (way out of context)
%
Bawden is misinformed. Common Lisp has no philosophy. We are held
together only by a shared disgust for all the alternatives.
-- Scott Fahlman, explaining why Common Lisp is the way it is....
%
Well, it's assembly language, you know. You don't want to have too much
taste...
-- Dave Moon
%
Jeez, got me. Unix is sorta like Heroin, It feels good for about 5 minutes
a day and horrible the rest of the time.
-- Jim O'Dell
%
Anyway I know how to not be bothered by consing on the fly.
-- Dave Moon
%
My dog appears to require more PM than my car, although he also seems to be
cheaper to service.
-- GSB
%
The software isn't finished until the last user is dead.
%
u x
e du dx, e dx!
cosine, tangent, secant, sine!
3.14159!
square root, integral, u dv!
slipstick, slide rule, MIT!
logarithm, logarithm, Tech, Tech, Tech!
%
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
%
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuts play only bit parts.
%
The average woman would rather have beauty than brains because the average
man can see better than he can think.
%
Bushydo, the way of the shrub -- BONSAI!
%
Chaotic Evil means never having to say you're sorry.
%
DO IT -- it's easier to get forgiveness than permission.
%
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard
to light.
%
The first cup of coffee recapitulates phylogeny.
%
43% of all statistics are worthless.
%
Go, lemmings, go!
%
God didn't create the world in seven days -- He goofed off for six then
pulled an all-nighter.
%
God is real unless declared integer.
%
If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, it would probably
be a good thing.
%
If we were meant to fly, we wouldn't keep losing our luggage.
%
If you eat a live frog in the morning, nothing worse will happen to either
of you for the rest of the day.
%
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
%
I'm not born again -- my mother got it right the first time.
%
Implementing systems is 95% boredom and 5% sheer terror.
%
Is the surface of a planet the right place for an expanding technological
civilization?
%
Let me control a planet's oxygen supply and I don't care who makes the
laws.
%
Life's a duck, and then you sigh.
%
The light at the end of the tunnel may be an oncoming dragon.
%
Nobody can fix the economy. Nobody can be trusted with their finger on the
button. Nobody's perfect. VOTE FOR NOBODY.
%
1.79E12 furlongs/fortnight -- it's not just a good idea, it's the law.
%
Paranoid schizophrenics outnumber their enemies at least two to one.
%
Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth.
%
The shortest distance between two puns is a straight line.
%
Now is a good time to spend a year dead for tax purposes.
%
There are many intelligent species in the universe. They are all owned by
cats.
%
There are few personal problems which can't be solved by the suitable
application of high explosives.
%
There is no TRUTH.
There is no REALITY.
There is no CONSISTANCY.
There are no absolute statements.
I'm probably wrong.
%
A VAX is virtually a computer, but not quite.
%
Walk softly and carry a megawatt laser.
%
The way to a man's heart is with a broadsword.
%
We'll know that rock is dead when you have to have a degree to get a job in
it.
%
Windows and Icons and Mice, OH MY!
%
You are wise, witty, and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading
stupid fortune messages.
%
You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to swim on his back,
you've got something.
%
You know better than to trust a strange computer.
%
They'll take my PDP-10 away when they pry my cold dead fingers off the
switch registers.
%
Non-determinism means never having to say you're wrong.
%
Those who do not learn from history, loop.
%
We're Thinking Machines, so we don't have to.
%
It has every known bug fix to everything.
-- KLH (out of context)
%
The Three Laws of Thermodynamics:
1) You can't win, only lose or break even.
2) You can only break even at absolute zero.
3) You can't get to absolute zero.
%
It is usually a good idea to put a capacitor of a few microfarads across
the output, as shown.
%
In MDDT, no one can hear you scream...
But everybody can hear you say "whoops!"
%
Not only am I thrown into the error handler, through no fault of my own
(I'm not responsible for this deficiency in Zmail), but then the system
RUBS MY NOSE IN THE MESS by forcing me to give it permission to screw me
further. "I'm sorry, but I have just accidentally driven an eight-inch
spike halfway into your skull, you have two choices: either you can let me
finish and drive it the rest of the way in, or I can ask you this question
again."
-- Alan Bawden
%
When I first started taking these drugs, it was the government and the CIA
who gave them to us. You want to know why I believe in God? That's why.
God has a sense of humor. God says "Americans are really seized up in
their lower bowels, needing something to ooze them up." God thought, "let
the CIA give it to them." When you get that feeling something's laughing,
that's God.
-- Ken Kesey
%
Andre Glucksman ... said [to me] "do you know what you accomplished? You
added the idea to revolutionary theory that revolution could be fun. Only
someone as silly as an American could do that."
-- Abbie Hoffman
%
Next year in L5.
%
I'm sure glad we're having this "How many FTP transfers can dance on the
head of a chargeback packet" conversation now, because when chargebacks
happen, it will surely be too expensive to read these amazing
conversations.
%
;;; Nobody except a qualified mail wizard should ever modify ;;;
;;; this file. You are -not- a mail wizard just because you ;;;
;;; know how to read your mail. Fuck with this file, and I'll ;;;
;;; cut your balls off. -Alan ;;;
%
Johnny was young. Too young to remember Woodstock. But the name sounded
awesome, so he bought two tickets.
ONE WAY TICKETS TO A LIVING HELL!
They were two innocent, hardcore punks, caught in a nightmare world of
sheer mellow-ness! It was the ...
NIGHT OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD!
[The Band That Wouldn't Die...]
%
I really only meant to point out how nice InterOp was for someone who
doesn't have the weight of the Pentagon behind him. I really don't imagine
that the Air Force will ever be able to operate like a small, competitive
enterprise like GM or IBM.
-- Kent England
%
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.
%
Lisp stoppped itself
FEP Command:
%
I die. My replacement reads my uncommented code and deletes a
fragment he doesn't understand. Eventually the subroutine is sold to
the government, and the bug causes nuclear missles to be launched by
accident. The other side retaliates, and all die. O the embarrassment.
%
Think of C++ as an object-oriented assembly language.
-- Bruce Hoult (bruce@hoult.actrix.gen.nz)
%
The only thing better than TV with the sound off is Radio with the sound
off.
-- Dave Moon
%
A host is a host from coast to coast
And nobody talks to a host that's close
Unless the host that isn't close
Is busy, hung or dead...
%
Since oral sex is topologically equivalent to anal sex, converting one
to the other is simply a matter of finding the right conformal map.
Currently I only have solutions for a spherical girlfriend.
-- Robert Bowler
%
Hey, diddle, diddle the overflow pdl
To get a little more stack;
If that's not enough then you lose it all
And have to pop all the way back.
-- The Great Quux
%
Wiener's Law of Libraries:
There are no answers, only cross references.
%
;;; Halley
(Halley's Comment)
%
It worked about as well as sticking a blender in the middle of a lime
plantation and hoping they'll make margaritas out of themselves.
-- Frederick J. Polsky v1.0
%
HOST SYSTEM RESPONDING, PROBABLY UP...
%
/* I'd just like to take this moment to point out that C has all
the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string.
*/
-- Jamie Zawinski in the XKeyCaps source
%
She can kill all your files;
She can freeze with a frown.
And a wave of her hand brings the whole system down.
And she works on her code until ten after three.
She lives like a bat but she's always a hacker to me.
-- Apologies to Billy Joel
%
When I met th'POPE back in '58, I scrubbed him with a MILD SOAP or
DETERGENT for 15 minutes. He seemed to enjoy it ...
%
Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding.
Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.
-- Alan Perlis
%
Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.
-- Alan Perlis
%
In the long run every program becomes rococo - then rubble.
-- Alan Perlis
%
Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
-- Alan Perlis
%
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming,
is not worth knowing.
-- Alan Perlis
%
Optimization hinders evolution.
-- Alan Perlis
%
A good system can't have a weak command language.
-- Alan Perlis
%
For systems, the analogue of a face-lift is to add to the control graph an
edge that creates a cycle, not just an additional node.
-- Alan Perlis
%
You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on
the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
-- Alan Perlis
%
As Will Rogers would have said, "There is no such thing as a free variable."
-- Alan Perlis
%
When we understand knowledge-based systems, it will be as before --
except our fingertips will have been singed.
-- Alan Perlis
%
A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
-- Alan Perlis
%
In computing, invariants are ephemeral.
-- Alan Perlis
%
When we write programs that "learn", it turns out that we do
and they don't.
-- Alan Perlis
%
If we believe in data structures, we must believe in independent
(hence simultaneous) processing. For why else would we collect items
within a structure? Why do we tolerate languages that give us the one
without the other?
-- Alan Perlis
%
Over the centuries the Indians developed sign language for communicating
phenomena of interest. Programmers from different tribes (FORTRAN, LISP,
ALGOL, SNOBOL, etc.) could use one that doesn't require them to carry
a blackboard on their ponies.
-- Alan Perlis
%
It is the user who should parameterize procedures, not their creators.
-- Alan Perlis
%
Motto for a research laboratory: What we work on today,
others will first think of tomorrow.
-- Alan Perlis
%
Though the Chinese should adore APL, it's FORTRAN they put their money on.
-- Alan Perlis
%
Computation has made the tree flower.
-- Alan Perlis
%
The computer is the ultimate polluter: its feces are indistinguishable
from the food it produces.
-- Alan Perlis
%
Interfaces keep things tidy, but don't accelerate growth: functions do.
-- Alan Perlis
%
Objects keep things tidy, but don't accelerate growth: inheritance does.
-- James A. Crippen (after Alan Perlis)
%
In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
-- Alan Perlis
%
Purely applicative languages are poorly applicable.
-- Alan Perlis
%
The proof of a system's value is its existence.
-- Alan Perlis
[Thus implying COBOL and JCL /do/ have some value after all! Ed.]
%
Editing is a rewording activity.
-- Alan Perlis
[And EMACS a rewording editor. Ed.]
%
Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
-- Alan Perlis
%
The only constructive theory connecting neuroscience and psychology
will arise from the study of software.
-- Alan Perlis
[To the endless aggravation of both disciplines. Ed.]
%
You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write,
even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
-- Alan Perlis
%
Programming is an unnatural act.
-- Alan Perlis
%
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing
thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
-- Alan Perlis
%
After the ordeal, we went back to the Factory. Greenblatt said he
was gonna locate us in a cell. He said: "Kid, I'm gonna INTERN you in a
cell. I want your manual and your mouse."
I said, "Greenblatt, I can understand your wantin' my manual, so
I don't have any documentation about the cell, but what do you want my
mouse for?" and he said, "Kid, we don't want any window system problems".
I said, "Greenblatt, did you think I was gonna deexpose myself for
litterin'?"
Greenblatt said he was makin' sure, and, friends, Greenblatt
was, 'cause he took out the left Meta-key so I couldn't double bucky the
rubout and cold-boot, and he took out the Inspector so I couldn't
click-left on Modify, set the PROCESS-WARM-BOOT-ACTION on the window,
*THROW around the UNWIND-PROTECT and have an escape. Greenblatt was
makin' sure.
-- from Alice's Lispm (or MIT's AI Lab)
%
Because Greenblatt came to the realization that it was a typical
case of LCS state-of-the-art technology, and there wasn't nothin' he
could do about it, and the judge wasn't gonna look at the seventeen
1K-by-32 pixel multi-flavored windows with turds and arrows and
documentation panes, explainin' what each one was, to be used as
evidence against us.
And we was fined fifty zorkmids and had to rebuild the world
load...in the snow.
-- from Alice's Lispm (or MIT's AI Lab)
%
I went up there, I said, "Eliot, I wanna lose. I wanna lose!
I wanna see hacks and kludges and unbound variables and cruft in my
code! Eat dead power supplies with cables between my teeth! I mean
lose! lose! lose!"
And I started jumpin' up and down, yellin' "LOSE! LOSE! LOSE!"
and Stallman walked in and started jumpin' up and down with me, and we
was both jumpin' up and down, yellin', "LOSE! LOSE! LOSE! LOSE!!" and
some professor came over, gave me a 6-3 degree, sent me down the hall,
said "You're our distinguished lecturer." Didn't feel too good about it.
-- from Alice's Lispm (or MIT's AI Lab)
%
He stopped me right there and said, "Kid, I want you to go over
and sit down on that bench that says 'LISP Machine Group'... NOW, KID!"
And I walked over to the bench there, and there's... The LISP
Machine Group is where they put you if you may not be moral enough to
join Symbolics after creatin' your special form.
There was all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly-lookin' people on the
bench there ... there was Microcoders, DPL hackers, File System
hackers, and Window System Hackers!! Window System hacker sittin'
right there on the bench next to me! And the meanest, ugliest,
nastiest one... the kludgiest Window System hacker of them all... was
comin' over to me, and he was mean and ugly and nasty and horrible and
all kinds of things, and he sat down next to me. He said, "Kid, you
get a new copy of the sources?" I said, "I didn't get nothin'. I had
to rebuild the world load."
He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?" and I said,
"Littering..." And they all moved away from me on the bench there,
with the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean, nasty things, 'til I
said, "And making gratuitous modifications to LMIO; sources..." And
they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the
bench talkin' about microcoding, DPL designing, file-system hacking,
... and all kinds of groovy things that we was talkin' about on the
bench, and everything was fine.
-- from Alice's Lispm (or MIT's AI Lab)
%
You can hack anything you want
on MIT Lisp Machines
You can hack anything you want
on MIT Lisp Machines
Walk right in and begin to hack
Just push your stuff right onto the stack
You can hack anything you want
on MIT Lisp Machines
(but dont forget to fix the bug...on MIT Lisp Machines!)
-- from Alice's Lispm (or MIT's AI Lab)
%
Real Programmers are surprised when the odometers in their cars don't
turn from 99999 to A0000.
%
You are connected t&%&ibp*l an error free line.
%
Mail should be at least a mixture of upper and lower case. Devising
your own font (Devanagari, pinhead graphics, etc.) and using it in the
mail is a good entertainment tactic, as is finding some way to use
existing obscure fonts.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
It is considered artful to append many messages on a subject, leaving
only the most inflammatory lines from each, and reply to all in one
swift blow. The choice of lines to support your argument can make or
break your case.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Replying to one's own message is a rarely-exposed technique for
switching positions once you have thought about something only after
sending mail.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
State opinions in the syntax of fact: "...as well as the bug in LMFS
where you have to expunge directories to get rid of files....."
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
If you have nothing to say on a subject, replying with a line such as,
"I agree with this." puts you in the TO:'s for all future messages, and
establishes you as "one who really cares", if not an actual expert, on
the topic at hand.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Inclusion of very old messages from others makes for an impressive show.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
People can be set wondering by loading obscure personal patchable
systems, and sending bug reports. Who would not stop and wonder upon
seeing "Experimental TD80-TAPE 1.17, MegaDeath 2.5..."? The same for
provocatively-named functions and variables in stack traces.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Know the list of "large, chronic problems". If there is any problem
with the window system, blame it on the activity system. Any lack of
user functionality should be attributed to the lack of a command
processor. A suprisingly large number of people will believe that you
have thought in depth about the issue to which you are alluding when you
do.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Know how to blow any problem up into insolubility. Know how to use the
phrase "The new ~A system" to insult its argument, e.g., "I guess this
destructuring LET thing is fixed in the new Lisp system", or better yet,
PROLOG.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Never hit someone head on, always sideswipe. Never say, "Foo's last
patch was brain-damaged", but rather, "While fixing the miscellaneous
bugs in 243.xyz [foo's patch], I found...."
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Idiosyncratic indentations, double-spacing, capitalization, etc., while
stamps of individuality, leave one an easy target for parody.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Strong language gets results. "The reloader is completely broken in
242" will open a lot more eyes than "The reloader doesn't load files
with intermixed spaces, asterisks, and <'s in their names that are
bigger than 64K". You can always say the latter in a later paragraph.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Including a destination in the CC list that will cause the recipients'
mailer to blow out is a good way to stifle dissent.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
When replying, it is often possible to cleverly edit the original
message in such a way as to subtly alter its meaning or tone to your
advantage while appearing that you are taking pains to preserve the
author's intent. As a bonus, it will seem that your superior
intellect is cutting through all the excess verbiage to the very heart
of the matter.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Referring to undocumented private communications allows one to claim
virtually anything: "we discussed this idea in our working group last
year, and concluded that it was totally brain-damaged".
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Points are awarded for getting the last word in. Drawing the
conversation out so long that the original message disappears due to
being indented off the right hand edge of the screen is one way to do
this. Another is to imply that anyone replying further is a hopeless
cretin and is wasting everyone's valuable time.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Keeping a secret "Hall Of Flame" file of people's mail indiscretions,
or copying messages to private mailing lists for subsequent derision,
is good fun and also a worthwhile investment in case you need to
blackmail the senders later.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Users should cultivate an ability to make the simplest molehill into a
mountain by finding controversial interpretations of innocuous
sounding statements that the sender never intended or imagined.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Obversely, a lot of verbal mileage can also be gotten by sending out
incomprehensible, cryptic, confusing or unintelligible messages, and
then iteratively "correcting" the "mistaken interpretations" in the
replys.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Trivialize a user's bug report by pointing out that it was fixed
independently long ago in a system that hasn't been released yet.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
Send messages calling for fonts not available to the
recipient(s). This can (in the case of Zmail) totally disable
the user's machine and mail system for up to a whole day in some
circumstances.
-- from the Symbolics Guidelines for Sending Mail
%
This is a tale of a sorry quest
To master pure code at the T guru's behest
I enrolled in a class that appealing did seem
For it promised to teach fine things like T3 and Scheme
The first day went fine; we learned of cells
And symbols and lists and functions as well
Lisp I had mastered and excited was I
For to master T3 my hackstincts did cry
I sailed through the first week with no problems at all
And I even said "closure" instead of "function call"
Then said the master that ready were we
To start real hacking instead of simple theory
...
-- Ashwin Ram,
"A Short Ballad Dedicated to Program Growth"
%
...
Will you, said he, write me a function please
That in lists would associate values with keys
I went home and turned on my trusty Apollo
And wrote a function whose definition follows:
(cdr (assq key a-list))
A one-liner I thought, fool that I was
Just two simple calls without a COND clause
But when I tried this function to run
CDR didn't think that NIL was much fun
...
-- Ashwin Ram,
"A Short Ballad Dedicated to Program Growth"
%
...
So I tried again like the good King of yore
And of code I easily generated some more:
(cond ((assq key a-list) => cdr))
It got longer but purer, and it wasn't too bad
But then COND ran out and that was quite sad
...
-- Ashwin Ram,
"A Short Ballad Dedicated to Program Growth"
%
...
Well, that isn't hard to fix, I was told
Just write some more code, my son, be bold
Being young, not even a moment did I pause
I stifled my instincts and added a clause
(cond ((assq key a-list) => cdr)
(else nil))
Sometimes this worked and sometimes it broke
I debugged and prayed and even had a stroke
Many a guru tried valiantly to help
But undefined datums their efforts did squelch.
...
-- Ashwin Ram,
"A Short Ballad Dedicated to Program Growth"
%
...
I returneth once more to the great sage of T
For no way out of the dilemma I could see
He said it was easy -- more lines must I fill
with code, for FALSE was no longer NIL.
(let ((val (assq key a-list)))
(cond (val (cdr val))
(else nil)))
You'd think by now I might be nearing the end
Of my ballad which seems bad things to portend
You'd think that we could all go home scot-free
But COND eschewed VAL; it wanted #T
...
-- Ashwin Ram,
"A Short Ballad Dedicated to Program Growth"
%
...
So I went back to the master and appealed once again
I said, pardon me, but now I'm really insane
He said, no you're not really going out of your head
Instead of just VAL, you must use NOT NULL instead
(let ((val (assq key a-list)))
(cond ((not (null? val)) (cdr val))
(else nil)))
My song is over and I'm going home to bed
With this ineffable feeling that I've been misled
And just in case my point you have missed
Somehow I preferred (CDR (ASSQ KEY A-LIST))
-- Ashwin Ram,
"A Short Ballad Dedicated to Program Growth"
%
Mary had a little lambda
A sheep she couldn't clone
And every where that lambda went
Her calculus got blown
%
... The book [CLtL1] is about 400 pages of 8.5" by 11" Dover output.
Apparently the publisher and typesetter decided that this made the lines
too wide for easy reading, so they will use a 6" by 9" format. This
will make the shape of the book approximately cubical. Now, there are
26 chapters counting the index, and a Rubik's cube has 26 exterior cubies.
I'll let you individually extrapolate and fantasize from there.
-- GLS
%
Clearly one can make this generalization and people can live with it.
We could make the generalization that LIST can take some other options,
perhaps stating that we want a CDR-coded list, and it can define some
accessor functions, and some auxilliary storage, and make arrays a
specialization of CONS cells, but that would be silly (wouldn't it??).
The point is that vectors are a useful enough concept to not need to suffer
being a specialization of something else.
The political point I will not make, but will leave to your imagination.
-- RPG
(Referring to the 'Vectors vs Arrays' debate during
the Common Lisp debates.)
%
When my grandchildren, if any, ask me why certain things turned out in
somewhat ugly ways, I will tell them that it is for the same reason that
slaves count as 3/5 of a person in the U.S. Constitution -- that is the
price you pay for keeping the South on board (or the North, depending).
A few such crocks are nothing to be ashamed of, as long as the language
is still something we all want to use. Even with the recent spate of
ugly compromises, I think we're doing pretty well overall.
-- Scott E. Fahlman (during the Common Lisp debates)
%
SIGTHTBABW: a signal sent from Unix to its programmers at random
intervals to make them remember that There Has To Be A Better Way.
-- Erik Naggum
%
The Larceny Carol
O Larceny, O Larceny,
Hygienic are your macros.
O Larceny, O Larceny,
Hygienic are your macros.
You lift known lambdas node by node,
Compiling them to native code.
O Larceny, O Larceny,
Hygienic are your macros.
O Larceny, O Larceny,
Collecting garbage quickly.
O Larceny, O Larceny,
Collecting garbage quickly.
With generations as you please,
From oldest-first to nurseries,
O Larceny, O Larceny,
Collecting garbage quickly.
-- William D. Clinger
%
Visual Basic is not an object oriented language, it is an object based
language. It is a poor imitation of an object system for a poor
imitation of a programming language that poor imitations of
programmers use to write poor imitations of programs for poor
imitations of employers who pay poor imitations of programmers
salaries. I think I beat that one to death.
-- Jim H. Jacobs, CS403: Object Oriented Programming
%
I have stopped reading Stephen King novels. Now I just read C code
instead.
-- Richard A. O'Keefe
%
C program run -- Run program run -- Run, C program, Run! -- (please)
%
The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert's Symphony number 9.
-- Erwin Dieterich
%
When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.
-- Steve Hoflich on compl.lang.c++
%
Being really good at C++ is like being really good at using rocks to
sharpen sticks.
-- Thant Tessman
%
"So, when you typed in the date, it exploded into a sheet of blue
flame and burned the entire admin wing to the ground? Yes, that's a
known bug. We'll be fixing it in the next release. Until then, try not
to use European date format, and keep an extinguisher handy."
-- slam@pobox.com (Tequila Rapide)
%
> Feel free to post more examples of "Why c++ sucks". ;-)
Read through the C++ Public Review Document and look for occurences of
the phrases "behavior is undefined" and especially "no diagnostic is
required".
Or here's an even simpler indicator of how much C++ sucks: Print out
the C++ Public Review Document. Have someone hold it about three feet
above your head and then drop it. Thus you will be enlightened.
-- Thant Tessman
%
(eq? 'truth 'beauty) ; to avoid unassigned-var error, since compiled code
; will pick up previous value to var set!-ed,
; the unassigned object.
-- from BBN-CL's cl-parser.scm
%
ITEM 163 (Sussman):
To exchange two variables in LISP without using a third variable:
(SETQ X (PROG2 0 Y (SETQ Y X)))
%
ITEM 172 (Gosper):
The fundamental operation for building list structure, called CONS, is
defined to: find a free cell in memory, store the argument in it,
remove it from the set of free cells, return a pointer to it, and call
the garbage collector when the set is empty. This can be done in two
instructions:
CONS: EXCH A,[EXCH A,[...[PUSHJ P,GC]...]]
EXCH A,CONS
Of course, the address-linked chain of EXCH's indicated by the nested
brackets is concocted by the garbage collector. This method has the
additional advantage of not constraining an accumulator for the free
storage pointer.
UNCONS: HRLI A,(EXCH A,)
EXCH A,CONS
EXCH A,@CONS
Returns cell addressed by A to free storage list; returns former cell
contents in A.
%
The HACTRN
Once before a console dreary, while I programmed, weak and weary,
Over many a curious program which did TECO's buffer fill, --
While I pondered, nearly sleeping, suddenly there came a feeping,
As of something gently beeping, beeping with my console's bell.
"'Tis my DDT," I muttered, "feeping on my console's bell:
Once it feeped, and now is still."
Ah, distinctly I remember that dark night in bleak December,
And each separate glowing symbol danced before me, bright and chill.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow
From my HACTRN aid for sorrow -- sorrow for the bugs which fill --
For the strange unknown and nameless bugs which ever all my programs fill --
Bugs which now I searched for still.
And the coughing, whirring, gritty fan I heard inside my TTY
Made me with fantastic terrors never known before to thrill;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart I stood repeating,
"'Tis some interrupt entreating DDT to signal me --
Some strange interrupt entreating DDT to signal me --
Its importance surely nil."
Presently my soul grew stronger: hesitating then no longer
I decided that I would respond to this strange program's call;
TECO, which I then attended, to my soul more strength extended;
With ^Z I ascended, going to my DDT --
<esc><esc>V I typed, and answered soon my DDT --
TECO there, and that was all!
Dumbly at my console peering, as I sat there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting now that any interrupt was ever there to call;
But the silence was unbroken, and my HACTRN gave no token,
And the only sound there spoken from my TTY's whirring fan --
The low and rough and distant sound came from my TTY's whirring fan --
TECO there, and that was all.
Back into my TECO going, with my pounding heart now slowing,
Soon again I heard a feeping, somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely this is some strange bug of RMS's
Which an interrupt professes, though I have no other job;
Let me then ask DDT if it thinks there's another job --
'Tis a bug, and nothing more!"
Again I went up to my HACTRN while cold shivers up my back ran
<esc><esc>V I typed, my jobs now once more to display.
Only TECO was there listed; though my trembling heart resisted
Yet I willed my hand, insisted, <esc>J to quickly type --
To answer this bold query DDT did hesitantly type
A ghostly "FOOBARJ".
From <esc><esc>V protected, now, this phantom job, selected
Gave no clue to why it had invoked that former beeping shrill.
"Though," I said, "you're no inferior, I shall act as your superior
And examine your interior, this strange matter to explore."
Then I typed a 0/ this matter further to explore --
Quoth the HACTRN, ":KILL".
Much I worried -- this outrageous bug might prove to be contagious,
Though thus far it had not seemed to do my TECO any ill:
For we cannot help concurring such a bug would cause a stirring,
Feeping on a console whirring, disappearing then from sight --
An evanescent mystery subjob disappearing then from sight
With no clue but ":KILL"!
But my HACTRN, swapping, running, gave no further sign of cunning
By this unknown phantom, which was in a thirty second sleep;
None of this I comprehended; to my TECO I descended,
And in terror I pretended that the bug had gone away --
I pretended that for good the mystery bug had gone away --
When my console gave a feep.
Now I quickly, hoping, praying, started up a PEEK displaying
All the the jobs and subjobs there which did the system fill:
What I found was quite unpleasant, for there was no FOOBAR present:
Only TECO was there present, underneath my DDT;
I quit the PEEK, and "FOOBAR<esc>J" typed out my DDT --
Then quoth the HACTRN, ":KILL".
But -- this FOOBAR now beguiling all my sad soul into smiling --
I tightly grinned, determined that this glitch should cause nobody ill;
Now, into my armchair sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking why this unknown phantom job --
Why this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and unknown phantom job
Feeped and did a ":KILL".
This I sat engaged in guessing, but conceived no thought expressing
How a phantom job could sound those strange and ghostly beeps;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining,
With the symbols coldly shining at me from the CRT,
With the bright, sharp symbols coldly shining on the CRT --
Which suddenly gave seven feeps!
Then methought the air grew denser, filled with clouds which grew immenser,
As when under darkened daylight thick and stormy weather brews;
With some bit of hesitation stemming from my trepidation
Again I typed that incantation finding out how much I'd lose --
<esc><esc>V I typed again to find how much I'd lose --
TECO there, and seven FOOs!
"Job!" said I, "with ghostly manner! -- subjob still, if LISP or PLANNER!
Whether accident, or feeping as another hacker wills!
Tell me now why I am losing, why my HACTRN you're abusing,
Which no doubt is of your choosing: echo truly on my screen!"
Then DDT as if in answer echoed quickly on my screen,
Typing seven ":KILLs".
"Job!" said I, "with ghostly manner! -- subjob still, if LISP or PLANNER!
By the ITS above us which the DSKDMP doth fulfill,
I shall be the system's saviour: I shall mend your crude behaviour,
I shall halt your strange behaviour, and thee from the system lock!"
Madly, wildly laughing I made DDT invoke a LOCK,
And quickly typed thereat -- "5KILL"!
"Be this now our sign of parting, phantom job!" I shrieked, upstarting,
As my HACTRN now informed me ITS was going down in 5:00.
"You have run your last instruction and performed your final function!"
But, refuting this deduction HACTRN then my TTY grabbed --
To type out yet another message HACTRN now my TTY grabbed --
Quoth the HACTRN, "ITS REVIVED!"
And the FOOBAR, never sleeping, still is beeping, still is beeping
On the glaring console out from which I cannot even log!
And other happenings yet stranger indicate inherent danger
When bugs too easily derange or mung the programs of machines;
When programs too "intelligent" start taking over the machines:
Is this the end of AutoProg?
-- The Great Quux
(with apologies to
Edgar Allan Poe)
%
Lambda Bound
[to be sung to the tune of
Homeward Bound]
I'm just a little value cell,
And I play my special role so well --
Hmmm --
Serving as a global switch
To predicate some system glitch;
But some strange value -- who knows which? --
Could cause me functions to bewitch!
Lambda bound!
I wish I was
Lambda bound!
Bound, so no SETQ's get me;
Bound, so quits will reset me;
Bound, where I can forget my
Top-level value.
It's hard to catch those system screws:
'Most any value causes me to lose --
Hmmm --
Each atom looks the same to me,
Whose interned name I cannot see,
And every NIL and every T
Reminds me that I long to be
Lambda bound!
I wish I was
Lambda bound!
Bound, so no SETQ's get me;
Bound, so quits will reset me;
Bound, where I can forget my
Top-level value.
Next time I'll have a MAR break set
And try to catch each clobber threat --
Hmmm, mmmm --
The next covert attempt to mung
Will cause the MAR break to be sprung,
But then the poor LISP will be hung
Because I'm not as I have sung:
Lambda bound!
I wish I was
Lambda bound!
Bound, so no SETQ's get me;
Bound, so quits will reset me;
Bound, where I can forget my
Top-level value.
-- The Great Quux
(with apologies to
Paul Simon)
%
My Favorite Hacks
[to be sung to the tune of
My Favorite Things
from The Sound of Music]
Circular MAPCAR and ANDCA'd negation,
Indirect JMP auto-incrementation,
Tangled spaghetti embroidered in stacks:
These are a few of my favorite hacks.
Mismatched DEFINE-TERMIN pairs with .QUOTEing,
Misbalanced brackets for macroed remoting,
PDP-6's with chess tourney plaques:
These are a few of my favorite hacks.
LAMBDAs as GO TOs and spooling on TPLs,
Flip-flops and bit drops and TRCE's in triples,
Crufty heuristics that prune minimax:
These are a few of my favorite hacks.
When the bugs strike,
When the disks crash,
When I read this verse,
I simply remember my favorite hacks
And then I feel even worse!
-- The Great Quux
(with apologies to
Rodgers and Hammerstein)
%
PLIate's Dream
[to be sung to the tune of
Pilate's Dream
from Jesus Christ Superstar]
I dreamed I was a brand new language,
The ultimate in speed;
I handled strings as fast as RPG,
And twice as easily.
I crunched numbers like COBOL,
Trees like APL,
And FORTRAN loaned its FORMATs and GO TOs,
The cause of many screws.
And then a man said, "Now we'll write a monitor,
With Multics what it's for.
Our project is begun;
We'll code in PL/I."
Then I saw thousands of coders
Searching for their bugs,
And then I heard them mentioning my name
And leaving me the blame.
-- The Great Quux
(with apologies to
Rice and Webber)
%
Save the environment. Create a closure today.
-- Cormac Flanagan
%
CLOS isn't the solution to everything. Common Lisp (which includes
CLOS) is the solution to everthing ;)
-- Kelley Edward Murray (kem@franz.com)
%
If you like, consider me to just be saying that when you add a tiny
conceptual amount of theoretical complexity going from a Lisp1 to a
Lisp2, you get an tiny theoretical speedup...
-- Kent M. Pitman
%
People in the Algol/Fortran world complained for years that they
didn't understand what possible use function closures would have in
efficient programming of the future. Then the `object oriented
programming' revolution happened, and now everyone programs using
function closures, except that they still refuse to to call them that.
-- Henry Baker
%
Just because we Lisp programmers are better than
everyone else is no excuse for us to be arrogant. ;-)
-- Erann Gat
%
Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as
sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause
suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a
mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an
aura of power on the user.
-- Niklaus Wirth
%
General recursion is the `go to' of functional programming.
-- Erik Meijer
%
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], `Pray,
Mr.Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right
answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of
confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-- Charles Babbage
%
If a `religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains
unprovable statements, then Godel taught us that mathematics is not
only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be
one.
-- John Barrow
%
A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps,
snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana
bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a
jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal--Panama!
-- GLS, Common Lisp: The Language
[This is an extreme example of a palindrome if you didn't notice. Ed.]
%
Functions compute; macros translate.
-- Dave Moon
%
Much of [Scheme's] power comes from its simplicity ... "The fox knows
many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing." Scheme is a
hedgehog.
-- PC Scheme Tutorial, viii (Texas Instruments)
%
The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck
me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better
-- Edsger Dijkstra
%
I bet the human brain is a kluge.
-- Marvin Minsky
%
There's no sense in being precise, when you don't even know what
you're talking about.
-- John von Neumann
%
As I was passing Project MAC,
I met a Quux with seven hacks.
Every hack had seven bugs;
Every bug had seven manifestations;
Every manifestation had seven symptoms.
Symptoms, manifestations, bugs, and hacks,
How many losses at Project MAC?
-- TGQ April 27, 1974
%
Compiling SYS:CLOS;LANGUAGE-SUPPORT.LISP.NEWEST
For Function MAKE-STANDARD-METHOD-LAMBDA
The iteration variable IGNORE is implicitly used, so it may not be ignored.
%
Reclaimer, spare that tree!
Take not a single bit!
It used to point to me,
Now I'm protecting it.
It was the reader's CONS
That made it, paired by dot;
Now, GC, for the nonce,
Thou shalt reclaim it not.
That old familiar tree,
Whose CDRs and whose CARs
Are spread, o'er memory --
And wouldst thou it unparse?
GC, cease and desist!
In it no freelist store;
Oh spare that moby list
Now pointing throughout core!
It was my parent tree
When it was circular;
It pointed then to me:
I was its CADADR.
My CDR was a list,
My CAR a dotted pair --
That tree will sore be missed
If it remains not there.
And now I to thee point,
A saving root, old friend!
Thou shalt remain disjoint
From freelists to the end.
Old tree! The sweep still brave!
And, GC, mark this well:
While I exist to save,
Thou shan't reclaim one cell.
-- The Great Quux
(with apologies to
George Pope Morris)
%
I think that I shall never see
A matrix lovely as a tree.
Trees are fifty times as fun
As structures a la PL/I
(Which Dijkstra claims are too baroque).
And SNOBOL's strings just can't compare
With all the leaves a tree may bear.
And COMIT strings are just a joke.
Vectors, tuples too, are nice,
But haven't the impressive flair
Of trees to which a LISP is heir.
A LISPer's life is paradise!
Many people think that JOSS
And others, too, are strictly boss;
And there are many BASIC fans
Who think their favorite language spans
All that would a user please.
Compared to LISP they're all a loss,
For none of them gives all the ease
With which a LISP builds moby trees.
RPG is just a nurd
(As you no doubt have often heard);
The record layouts are absurd,
And numbers packed in decimal form
Will never fit a base-two word
Without a veritable storm
Of gross conversions fro and to
With them arithmetic to do.
And one must allocate the field
Correct arithmetic to yield,
And decimal places represent
Truncation loss to circumvent:
Thus RPG is second-rate.
In LISP one needn't allocate
(That boon alone is heaven-sent!)
The scheme is sheer simplicity:
A number's just another tree.
When numbers threaten overflow
LISP makes the number tree to grow,
Extending its significance
With classic treelike elegance.
A LISP can generate reports,
Create a file, do chains and sorts;
But one thing you will never see
Is moby trees in RPG.
One thing the average language lacks
Is programmed use of push-down stacks.
But LISP provides this feature free:
A stack - you guessed it - is a tree.
An empty stack is simply NIL.
In order, then, the stack to fill
A CONS will push things on the top;
To empty it, a CDR will
Behave exactly like a pop.
A simple CAR will get you back
The last thing you pushed on the stack;
An empty stack's detectable
By testing with the function NULL.
Thus even should a LISPer lose
With PROGs and GOs, RETURNs and DOs,
He need his mind not overtax
To implement recursive hacks:
He'll utilize this clever ruse
Of using trees as moby stacks.
Some claim this method is too slow
Because it uses CONS so much
And thus requires the GC touch;
It has one big advantage, though:
You needn't fear for overflow.
Since LISP allows its trees to grow,
Stacks can to any limits go.
COBOL input is a shame:
The implementors play a game
That no two versions are the same.
And rocky is the FORTRAN road
One's alpha input to decode:
The FORMAT statement is to blame,
But on the user falls the load.
And FOCAL input's just a farce;
But all LISP input comes pre-parsed!
(The input reader gets its fame
By getting storage for each node
From lists of free words scattered sparse.
It parses all the input strings
With aid of mystic mutterings;
From dots and strange parentheses,
From zeros, sevens, A's and Z's,
Constructs, with magic reckonings,
The pointers needed for its trees.
It builds the trees with complex code
With rubout processing bestowed;
When typing errors do forebode
The rubout makes recovery tame,
And losers then will oft exclaim
Their sanity to LISP is owed -
To help these losers is LISP's aim.)
The flow-control of APL
And OS data sets as well
Are best described as tortured hell.
For LISPers everything's a breeze;
They neatly output all their trees
With format-free parentheses
And see their program logic best
By how their lovely parens nest.
While others are by GOs possessed,
And WHILE-DO, CASE, and all the rest,
The LISPing hackers will prefer
With COND their programs to invest
And let their functions all recur
When searching trees in maddened quest.
Expanding records of fixed size
Will quickly programs paralyze.
Though ISAM claims to be so wise
In allocating overflow,
Its data handling is too slow
And finding it takes many tries.
But any fool can plainly see
Inherent flexibility
In data structured as a tree.
When all their efforts have gone sour
To swell fixed records, losers glower.
But list reclaimers hour by hour
By setting all the garbage free
Yield CONSequent capacity:
Thus trees indefinitely flower.
(And trees run on atomic power!)
To men of sensibility
The lesson here is plain to see:
Arrays are used by clods like me,
But only LISP can make a tree.
- The Great Quux
(with apologies to
Joyce Kilmer)
%
Alphabetical Order
MACLISP Ben PDP-6 (may its core increase!)
Awoke one jiffy from a deep dream of trees
And saw, by parsing out a TTY: .FILE. (DIR)
Scanning all the jobs, within the system here,
A PEEK, displaying on a CRT of gold;
A low USRTIM made the MACLISP bold:
And to the PEEK by CLI: a message sent,
"What displayest thou?" The message to it quickly went,
And the PEEK through CLA: a message did transduce,
And answer'd "The names of programs of practical use."
"And is mine one?" sent MACLISP. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the PEEK. MACLISP ran more slow
But swapping still. "I pray thee then," it sent,
"Display me as one that helps to systems implement."
The PEEK :KILLed and vanished. The next time
It ran again, in a display mode sublime,
It showed the names the Grim File Reaper had blessed,
And lo! MACLISP's name was thirty-seventh.
-- The Great Quux
(with apologies to
Leigh Hunt)
%
Lambda Bound
[to be sung to the tune of
Homeward Bound]
I'm just a little value cell,
And I play my special role so well --
Hmmm --
Serving as a global switch
To predicate some system glitch;
But some strange value -- who knows which? --
Could cause me functions to bewitch!
Lambda bound!
I wish I was
Lambda bound!
Bound, so no SETQ's get me;
Bound, so quits will reset me;
Bound, where I can forget my
Top-level value.
It's hard to catch those system screws:
'Most any value causes me to lose --
Hmmm --
Each atom looks the same to me,
Whose interned name I cannot see,
And every NIL and every T
Reminds me that I long to be
Lambda bound!
I wish I was
Lambda bound!
Bound, so no SETQ's get me;
Bound, so quits will reset me;
Bound, where I can forget my
Top-level value.
Next time I'll have a MAR break set
And try to catch each clobber threat --
Hmmm, mmmm --
The next covert attempt to mung
Will cause the MAR break to be sprung,
But then the poor LISP will be hung
Because I'm not as I have sung:
Lambda bound!
I wish I was
Lambda bound!
Bound, so no SETQ's get me;
Bound, so quits will reset me;
Bound, where I can forget my
Top-level value.
-- The Great Quux
(with apologies to
Paul Simon)
%
Higgledy piggledy,
Project MAC NCOMPLR
Still is committing its
DO-stepping sins:
Though it may seem somewhat
Counterintuitive,
FOO stepped by FOO screws; de-
Faulting it wins.
%
Quaxity quuxity,
MacLISP and NCOMPLR
Have a convention that
Makes losers freak:
Integers allocate
Hyperefficiently,
Bettering FORTRAN, but
Screwing up EQ.
%
Quaxity quuxity,
Teitelman's InterLISP
Has a DWIM feature that's
Really a screw;
MacLISP has evident
Superiority,
Letting its customer
Mean what he do.
%
Quaxity quuxity,
TGQ's NEWIO
Has many functions that
No one can grok:
Documentation is
Incomprehensible;
GLS will explain it, but
Still it's a crock.
%
Quaxity quuxity,
NIL the atomic one
Acts like a wavicle,
Seemingly twin:
Not just the inverse of
Verisimilitude;
Also the inverse of
Where lists begin.
%
Quaxity quuxy, A-
Merican businessmen
Use bicentennial,
Profit to gain.
Hope by the time we reach
Quadricentennial
They'll not so plague me -- ad-
Vertisements pain!
%
Quaxity quuxity,
Young Isaac Asimov
Strange thiotimoline's
Secret unfurled.
Cascaded series of
Endochronometers
Brought paradoxical
Floods on the world
%
Quaxity quuxity,
Blish used philosophy
When he was writing "The
Quincunx of Time."
Beeps of Dirac used to
Chronocommunicate
Fostered determinate
Free will sublime.
%
Quaxity quuxity,
David J. Littleboy
(MIT graduate)
Makes his plans plain.
Leaving the study of
Data-technology,
He prefers seeking ma-
Terial gain.
%
I often have wondered in
What kind of orbit a
Planet proceeds in a
Tesseract space?
Multidimensional,
Hyperelliptical,
Dizzying spacemen in
Trans-solar chase.
%
Pauli and Heisenberg
Offer two rules for con-
Fused aristocracies,
Quantum domains:
"Egalitarian
Nonexclusivity
Must be forbidden"; "Un-
Certainty reigns."
%
Quaxiti quuxiti, Quaxity quuxity,
Remus et Romulus Remus and Romulus,
Gemini fratres a Wolf-nourished brothers, were
Lupa aluntur. Twins, so they say.
Romulus inquit: non Romulus patiently
Aedificabitur Founded a city; as
Paucis diebus, sed He said, "Rome will not be
Roma nascetur. Built in a day."
%
Quaxity quuxity,
Kenneth E. Iverson
Made APL, matrix
Hackers to please,
Not only famous for
Arithmeticity;
Also for characters.
(Wish it had trees!)
%
Quaxity quuxity,
Gerald J. Sussman made
HACKER so famous for
Loopholes it plugs.
Armed with its knowledge of
Entomological
Manifestations, it
Ferrets out bugs.
%
Quaxity quuxity,
XOR's more famous than
Brother EQUIV, though they've
Similar use.
Uncomplementary
Verisimilitude,
Rumor undoubtedly
Cooked EQUIV's goose.
%
Quaxity quuxy, Na-
Poleon Bonaparte
Conquered all Europe, but
What was the use?
Some say the problem was
Megalomania;
Others, he lacked modern
High-platform shoes.
%
Quaxity quuxity,
Backus's BNF
Drives a preprocessor,
Generates code.
Parsing is specified
Metasyntactically;
Writing it's easy, but
reading, I'm snowed.
%
My Favorite Hacks
[to be sung to the tune of
My Favorite Things
from The Sound of Music]
Circular MAPCAR and ANDCA'd negation,
Indirect JMP auto-incrementation,
Tangled spaghetti embroidered in stacks:
These are a few of my favorite hacks.
Mismatched DEFINE-TERMIN pairs with .QUOTEing,
Misbalanced brackets for macroed remoting,
PDP-6's with chess tourney plaques:
These are a few of my favorite hacks.
LAMBDAs as GO TOs and spooling on TPLs,
Flip-flops and bit drops and TRCE's in triples,
Crufty heuristics that prune minimax:
These are a few of my favorite hacks.
When the bugs strike,
When the disks crash,
When I read this verse,
I simply remember my favorite hacks
And then I feel even worse!
-- The Great Quux
(with apologies to
Rodgers and Hammerstein)
%
Circular MAPCAR
A constant or periodic series of arguments can be given to a
mapped function in LISP by supplying a circular list to MAPCAR. For
example:
((LAMBDA (C3)
(RPLACD C3 C3)
(MAPCAR 'CONS C3 THE-LIST))
(LIST 3))
conses a 3 onto every element of THE-LIST. Another way to use this
hack is to use MAP, which allows the mapped function to splice new
things into the circular list on the fly.
%
ANDCA'd negation
The sequence of PDP-10 instructions
MOVN A,NUMBER
ANDCA A,NUMBER
JUMPE A,FOO
jumps to FOO iff NUMBER is an exact power of two.
Indirect JMP auto-incrementation:
On the PDP-11, the instruction JMP @(R4)+ can be used as a
combined subroutine call and subroutine return, using the technique of
threaded code.
%
Mismatched DEFINE-TERMIN
Bizarre effects can be obtained in the MIDAS assembly language
for the PDP-10 by using .QUOTE to get in mismatched DEFINE-TERMIN
pairs. For example:
DEFINE DEFSYM X/
IRPS Z,,[X]
IFNDEF Z,X
.ELSE [
$$TEM1==Z
X
IFN Z-$$TEM1,.ERR Z MULTIPLY .QUOTE`.QUOTE/DEFINED/`
]
.ISTOP
TERMIN TERMIN
The multiple .QUOTEs allow used of the word DEFINED in the error
message.
%
Misbalanced brackets
A standard MIDAS hack for accumulating text in a macro to be
assembled at a remote location is:
;initialization:
DEFINE BNKBLK OP
OP
TERMIN ;BNKBLK accumulates text.
DEFINE BLCODE NEWCFT
BNKBLK [DEFINE BNKBLK OP
OP]NEWCFT
TERMIN
TERMIN ;BLCODE adds its arg to the end of BNK
;add some text:
BLCODE [FOO] ;add FOO.
BLCODE [BAR] ;add BAR (note BLCODE inserts CRLF's,
;assemble what has been accumulated:
BNKBLK ;which expands into ...
; FOO
; BAR
This hack depends on the misbalancing of the brackets in BLCODE with
respect to the DEFINE-TERMIN pairs.
%
TRCE's in triples
The sequence of PDP-10 instructions:
TRCE A,42
TRCE A,42
TRCE A,42
exchanges the 40 bit and the 2 bit in accumulator A.
%
Crufty heuristics
The alpha-beta technique, the gamma heuristic (described by
Newborn in his book "Computer Chess"), and others, are used to prune
minimax game trees.
%
:PDUMP
99 blocks of crud on the disk,
99 blocks of crud!
You patch a bug, and dump it again:
100 blocks of crud on the disk!
100 blocks of crud on the disk,
100 blocks of crud!
You patch a bug, and dump it again:
101 blocks of crud on the disk!
(Repeat ad nauseam...)
-- The Great Quux
2 December 1976
%
There was in ITS an escape code (whose name was DQOT) used internally
in the character streams for terminal output which was undocumented
for some reason. A call went out for jingles in 25 words or less.
DQOT'S myster-
ious and very weir-
d; it quotes another char-
acter, as noted where?
-- 1 September 1977
Es schneit, es schneit
With all its might!
I say, der Schnee
has come today!
-- 5 December 1977
%
BBN Superlisp
[to be sung to the tune of
Jesus Christ Superstar]
Every time I look at you I don't understand
Why you think "Do What I Mean" is so cool and grand;
You'd have managed better if you'd thought it through,
Why'd you pick such an awkward way your bugs to undo?
Your hairy feature will not be the last revolution,
It's clear "Mean What I Do" is the ultimate solution!
Don't you get me wrong,
Don't you get me wrong,
Don't you get me wrong, now,
Don't you get me wrong,
I only want to hack,
I only want to hack,
I only want to hack,
I only want to hack.
BBN! BBN! Some people think you're the living end!
BBN! BBN! Some people think you're the living end!
BBN! SuperLISP! Can "Do What I Mean" measure up to this?
BBN! SuperLISP! Can "Do What I Mean" measure up to this?
Tell us what you think about your friends at the top,
Who d'you think besides yourself's the pick of the crop?
Is LISP 1.5 where it's at? Is it where you are?
Does Stanford's LISP have features too or is that just PR?
Do you have the breakpoint scheme that MACLISP is known for,
Or is that just the kind of kludge the user's on his own for?
Don't you get me wrong,
Don't you get me wrong,
Don't you get me wrong, now,
Don't you get me wrong,
I only want to hack,
I only want to hack,
I only want to hack,
I only want to hack.
BBN! BBN! Some people think you're the living end!
BBN! BBN! Some people think you're the living end!
BBN! SuperLISP! Can "Do What I Mean" measure up to this?
BBN! SuperLISP! Can "Do What I Mean" measure up to this?
-- The Great Quux
(with apologies to
Rice and Webber)
%
Both Ways, Now
[to be sung to the tune of
Both Sides, Now]
Decimal digits in a row,
Just set the dials and let 'er go.
The ENIAC was grossly slow --
I used to code that way,
But then this Fortran came along;
I danced and sang a happy song:
So natural -- what could go wrong?
I little knew, that day!
I've looked at Fortran both ways, now,
At II and IV, and still somehow,
It's rows of numbers I recall;
I really don't know Fortran at all.
Fortran IV is real good stuff,
But business hackers have it tough;
For them this Fortran's not enough --
Then Cobol saved the day!
But now I sing a sad refrain;
This Cobol loss is no one's gain,
And writing programs is a pain
(I get writer's cramp that way!)
I've looked at Cobol both ways, now,
I code in it, and still somehow,
It's FORMAT statements I recall;
I really don't know Cobol at all.
Cobol will for business do;
Accounts and payroll make it through
(And bills for zero dollars too --
I get them every day!)
But those who hack symbolic frobs
Cannot make do with Cobol jobs,
And now I sing through anguished sobs,
But Lisp is here to stay.
I've looked at Lisp code both ways, now,
At lambda forms, and still somehow,
It's Cobol statements I recall;
I really don't know Lisp at all.
-- The Great Quux
(with apologies to
Joni Mitchell)
%
A Time for DWIM
[to be sung to the tune of
A Time for Us
(theme song from Romeo and Juliet)]
A time for DWIM
There'll never be;
No clever code
This losing mode
Can UNDO for me.
This "golden hope"
(To be denied)
Could never
Correctly fix the bugs my programs hide.
A way for bugs
There'll never be
To fix with generality.
So to this DWIM
Let's say farewell;
The crocks therein
Prove it can't win
And ring its knell:
Do What I Mean
Is just a ruse --
It really
Means only: Fix How Teitelman doth Lose!
-- The Great Quux
(with apologies to
Rota, Kusik, and Snyder)
%
It may surprise some people to know that the
PDP-10 instruction set, far from being innovative, was
developed strictly along classical lines. Many of the
operation codes, for example, come from the Latin. Two
fifth-declension nouns (declinable only in the
singular) are as follows:
Nominative: moves hrres
Genitive: movei hrrei
Dative: movei hrrei
Accusative: movem hrrem
Ablative: move hrre
There are, of course, also hlres, hrles, and
hlles. These all derive from the corresponding verbs
hrro, hrlo, etc. (second conjugation, semi-deponent.)
Thus when playing chess with MacHack one might say,
"movem hrro," that is, "I am hurrying a move."
Similarly, the code jffo ("i am jffing") comes
from a defective Latin verb dating from an era when
ancient computers marked time by periodically pushing
counters onto a wire. The number of empty spaces left
on the wire could easily be counted by an instruction
very like jffo, from which could be calculated the
number of "jiffies" (clock ticks; 1 jiffy = 40 seconds)
which had passed; hence the name.
Teutonic languages have also lent several words
to the PDP-10: rot ("red") derives from the pieces of
decayed redwood traditionally used as temporary markers
in older German manual shift registers; while ash was
commonly the result when an older German got disgusted
and threw his shift register in the fire.
--- The Great Quux
(with apologies to no one)
%
Notes taken in 6.893 (Machine Perception and Manipulation)
"... and so the line connecting the points Ga and Gb in gradient
space, which correspond to the planes A and B in image space, is the
set of points representing positions of a plane see-sawing around the
line of intersection between A and B..."
Now I see; then I saw;
The planes of a cube have a linear law.
The endpoints of lines in the gradient space
Show where the see-sawing planes fall into place.
Macrakis, sitting beside me, half-asleep: "COFFEE!"
Caffeine doesn't help me composing this verse.
It only awakes me; my thoughts all disperse.
One thinks better dozing, collapsed in a heap;
Why else are most students in classes asleep?
"... the lines in gradient space are perpendicular to the lines in
image space. This doesn't provide enough constraints, however.
Additional equations may be derived from the intensity information.
One can get one or more solutions for a trihedral vertex. If the
vertex has more than three planes, then there are more constraints
than necessary, and one may have to resort to least squares..."
Alone, the geometry isn't enough:
You also require intensity stuff.
We get enough data if points are tri-planed,
While four leave the gradients over-constrained.
%
Notes taken in 6.015 (Signals and Systems)
On Matched Filters:
The ancients used potions, their love schemes to hatch;
They knew the right philtre encouraged a match.
When a lad made a wink at a comely young lass,
The philtre she used was designed for a pass.
The signals to use were determined by philtre;
The two peaked as one, for the lad could not jilt her.
The two thus entwined, so that noise did not bother
(Excepting that made by the groom's in-law mother...)
On Time Division Multiplexing:
To get the most use from your broadcasting medium:
Activity is, strangely, relieved by the TDM.
%
As I've gained more experience with Perl it strikes me that it resembles
Lisp in many ways, albeit Lisp as channeled by an awk script on acid.
-- Tim Moore (on comp.lang.lisp)
%
The world is not octal despite DEC.
%
Hackers are just a migratory lifeform with a tropism for computers.
%
Premature optmztion is rt of al evl.
%
"If it has syntax, it isn't user friendly."
-- Sam Steingold <sds@gnu.org>
%
The nicest thing about the Alto is that it doesn't run faster at night.
%
The problem with Lisp is that it makes you so damned smug.
-- Jesse Bowman
%
And TECO Emacs begat EINE, and EINE begat ZWEI, and ZWEI begat Zmacs.
Thus was the ancestry of the Lisp Machine editor begun. And the
bastard child of EINE was Hemlock, which did abide in the land of
Spice Lisp, whose secrets were held by the Priests of the Carnegie
Mellon. And Hemlock did prosper in the land of Spice Lisp, and did
grow beyond the narrow borders of PERQ. For the land of Spice Lisp
became bound by marriage to the Common Lisp, and Hemlock did forsake
the language of MacLisp and its father EINE, and did sow new children
upon the ground of the Common Lisp of the Priests of Carnegie Mellon,
where its progeny would spread across Unix systems everywhere. But
the Great Emacs of Saint IGNUcius would overtake the spread of
Hemlock, for Saint IGNUcius spread a gospel far sweeter to the ears of
the masses than that of the authors of the Common Lisp Standard. Yea,
Hemlock, though it continue on even to this day amongst the
worshippers of the Priests of Carnegie Mellon, Hemlock did become
marginalized as it required a particular Common Lisp, whereas the
Great Emacs of Saint IGNUcius did spread its gospel in the language of
C, spoken by teeming masses of Unix hackers and other heathen.
-- James A. Crippen on alt.religion.emacs
%
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally
for machines to execute."
-- Abelson & Sussman, SICP (preface to the first edition)
%
"Lisp is a programmable programming language."
-- John Foderaro, CACM, September 1991
%
"One can even conjecture that Lisp owes its survival specifically to
the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me,
has regarded as a disadvantage."
-- John McCarthy, "Early History of Lisp"
%
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming:
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc
informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common
Lisp.
-- Phil Greenspun
"Including Common Lisp."
-- Robert Morris
%
"Most papers in computer science describe how their author learned what
someone else already knew."
-- Peter Landin
%
"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you
will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a
better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never
actually use Lisp itself a lot."
-- Eric S. Raymond
%
"Lisp is a programmer amplifier."
-- Martin Rodgers
%
"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to
predict the future is to invent it."
-- Alan Kay
%
"Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also
easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to
improve."
-- Alan Perlis
%
"Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its
day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of
today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in
unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes,
and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages."
-- Eric S. Raymond, "Open Sources"
%
"Common Lisp is politics, not art."
-- Scott Fahlman
%
"Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me."
-- David Thornley
(in reply to a question older than most languages)
%
"Language designers are not intellectuals. They're not as interested in
thinking as you might hope. They just want to get a language done and
start using it."
-- Dave Moon
%
"Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."
-- Alan Kay
%
DEFSYSTEM is to Lisp as make is to C. Which is to say,
* thoroughly incomprehensible at first sight
* not standard, but incompatible versions are provided by most vendors
-- Daniel Barlow
%
"KMP is the official language lawyer for comp.lang.lisp. If it wasn't
for him most of the flamewars would never end. He ends them by
leaving everyone confused, but still feeling enlightened. He is a
valuable resource for the Lisp community, like the erudite and cryptic
Zen master on the mountaintop."
-- James A. Crippen
%
Dalinian: Lisp. Java. Which one sounds sexier?
RevAaron: Definitely Lisp. Lisp conjures up images of hippy coders,
drugs, sex, and rock & roll. Late nights at Berkeley, coding in Lisp
fueled by LSD. Java evokes a vision of a stereotypical nerd, with no
life or social skills.
%
They didn't call him Wirth the Assassin for nothing. His favorite
weapon was a sharpened type declaration.
-- Lyle McKennot
%
Ah, but CL has a Dark Side, my young padewan, and you must take care
not to give yourself over to it.
CL's Force is the fact that it is a language-building language. For any
application domain, there may be a way of expressing that domain in such
a way that it becomes natural to solve problems in that domain. CL
shows itself most worthy in building those language domains.
But alas, many times a student of CL will become enamoured with his
own domain, thinking it is the best or only domain and thus his little
language that he has created is a better language than CL. Thus starts
the flirtation with the Dark Side: "if my little language suits me better
than just CL, then my little language must be better than CL and I should
promote it".
Use the Force, young padewan; feel its power. But beware the Dark Side;
many strong Jedi have given themselves over to it...
-- Duane Rettig (on comp.lang.lisp)
%
...Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics,
AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor
applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge
Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language,
Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web
Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to
list.
-- KMP
%
Emacs would be a *wonderful* operating system if only it had a decent text
editor.
%
"Some people have asked why they need a lisp image to build a lisp image
("why can't I just build from source?"). These people have clearly never
tried to compile GCC on a machine that doesn't have a C compiler installed.
-- Gary Byers
%
Did Lisp kill your father or something? Was your father driving along in his
sports car along the sea cliff road when a pair of giant evil sweaty
parentheses loomed up out of the rough dark sea and munched him, dragging his
corpse back to their dark chasm beneath the waves? Will there be an ironic
twist at the end of the movie when you eventually discover, after finally
slaying them, that the evil parens from the depths were actually the ones Java
programmers use to sort out their messy infix expressions?
-- David Golden on comp.lang.lisp
%
There is a rough formula to compute the probability that someone will write
a post generally trashing a given language:
p = o / (k * n)
Where o = opinonatedness,
k = knowledge of the language in question,
n = number of languages in which the author has written production code.
-- Roedy Green <look-on@mindprod.com> on comp.lang.lisp
%
> Lisp is the red pill. -- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp
You know, the other day I was eating a juicy and delicious steak, and
it made me think about your .sig. It's getting close to twenty years
since I first used Lisp, and some eleven of those years I've used
ALGOL-style languages. After nine years, you know what I realize?
Lisp isn't always doing what the Man tells you, fighting unkillable
bugs, being tired and cold, eating the same goddamn goop everyday...
Lisp is bliss. No more trying to make sense of C or Perl alphabet
soup: all I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead.
Lisp isn't the red pill. It's the blue pill.
Lisp. What a mind-job.
-- Peter Seibel on comp.lang.lisp
%
[dan`b] where do symbols come from? well, when a reader and a package love each
other very much ...
%
[noss] what is the terminology to separate lisp code as its textual
representation and the data is code language? i.e. what you pass to
READ and what you pass to EVAL?
[segv] you pass strings to read and forms to eval
[segv] strings or streams.
[antifuchs] you pass streams to READ (;
[segv] what antifuchs said.
[antifuchs] unless your read is read-from-string, right (:
[eval] I hat my IRC client, it pops up everytime my name is said
%
;; FIXME: This old CMU CL code probably deserves a comment
;; explaining to us mere mortals how it works...
[no other comment follows]
-- SBCL src/code/late-type.lisp
%
;; FIXME: It's unnecessarily confusing to have a structure accessor
;; named TYPE-CLASS-INFO which is an accessor for the CTYPE structure
;; even though the TYPE-CLASS structure also exists in the system.
;; Rename this slot: TYPE-CLASS or ASSOCIATED-TYPE-CLASS or something.
-- SBCL src/code/typedefs.lisp
%
;; KLUDGE: "DO NOT CONSTANT FOLD, EVIL COMPILER!"
(declare (notinline opaque-identity make-single-float make-double-float))
-- SBCL src/code/unportable-float.lisp
%
;;; Both of these operations "work" on structures, which allows the above
;;; weakening of STD-INSTANCE-P.
(defmacro std-instance-slots (x) `(%instance-ref ,x 1))
(defmacro std-instance-wrapper (x) `(%instance-layout ,x))
;;; KLUDGE: This one doesn't "work" on structures. However, we
;;; ensure, in SXHASH and friends, never to call it on structures.
(defmacro std-instance-hash (x) `(%instance-ref ,x 2))
-- SBCL src/pcl/low.lisp
%
;; FIXME: We're _WHAT_? Testing for type equality
;; with a specifier and #'EQUAL? *BOGGLE*. --
;; CSR, 2003-06-24
-- SBCL src/compiler/generic/primtype.lisp
%
;; KLUDGE: ANSI, in its wisdom, says that
;; EQL-SPECIALIZER-FORMs in EQL specializers are evaluated at
;; DEFMETHOD expansion time.
[...]
;; KLUDGE: PCL, in its wisdom, sometimes calls methods with
;; types which don't match their specializers.
-- SBCL src/pcl/boot.lisp
%
;;; KLUDGE: this is probably because ANSI, in its wisdom (CLHS
;;; 5.1.2.5) requires implementations to support
;;; (SETF (APPLY #'AREF ...) ...)
;;; [and also #'BIT and #'SBIT]. Yes, this is terrifying, and it's
;;; also terrifying that this sequence of definitions causes it to
;;; work.
-- SBCL src/code/array.lisp
%
;; ANSI, in its wisdom, says that READ should return END-OF-FILE
;; (and that this is not a READER-ERROR) when it encounters end of
;; file in the middle of something it's trying to read.
-- SBCL src/compiler/main.lisp
%
;;; KLUDGE: The %DEF-FOO functions used to implement the macros here
;;; are defined later in another file, since they use structure slot
;;; setters defined later, and we can't have physical forward
;;; references to structure slot setters because ANSI in its wisdom
;;; allows the xc host CL to implement structure slot setters as SETF
;;; expanders instead of SETF functions. -- WHN 2002-02-09
-- SBCL src/compiler/generic/vm-macs.lisp
%
;; KLUDGE: CMU CL in its wisdom (version 2.4.6 for
;; Debian Linux, anyway) raises a CL:WARNING
;; condition (not a CL:STYLE-WARNING) for undefined
;; symbols when converting interpreted functions,
;; causing COMPILE-FILE to think the file has a real
;; problem, causing COMPILE-FILE to return FAILURE-P
;; set (not just WARNINGS-P set).
-- SBCL src/compiler/ir1tran.lisp
%
;;; ANSI, in its wisdom, specifies that it's an error (specifically a
;;; TYPE-ERROR) to query the system about the translations of a string
;;; which doesn't have any translations. It's not clear why we don't
;;; just return NIL in that case, but they make the rules..
-- SBCL tests/pathnames.impure.lisp
%
<gusl> btw, do you know which symbol returns the result of the last evaluation?
<Xof> *
<gusl> great
<gusl> and what was the other one which returns the function it's in?
<Xof> -ENOSENSE
<gusl> thanks, Xof. This will help me a lot in debugging.
<gusl> what does the ENOSENSE part mean, btw?
<jdz> gusl: it means that the question does not compute
<gusl> jdz: but his answer was right
<gusl> - is what I was looking for
%
<gusl> given a list with #'s, how can you copy it into a plain list?
<Xach> it already is a plain list
<gusl> Xach: I mean, a list without #'s
<IPmonger> you could walk it and copy each element one at a time
<gusl> but there is no standard command?
<Xof> express your question in terms of the box-and-pointer diagrams
<bunny_magnet> [ IS | *-]--> [ THERE | *-]--> [ NO | *-]--> [ STANDARD |
*-]--> [ COMMAND | *-]--> [ ? | nil]
%
;;
;; Unlike the SOURCE-NAME slot, this slot's value should never
;; affect ordinary code behavior, only debugging/diagnostic behavior.
;;
;; Ha. Ah, the starry-eyed idealism of the writer of the above
;; paragraph.
-- SBCL src/compiler/node.lisp
%
;; Will Clingers number 1.448997445238699
;; Doug Curries numbers 214748.3646, 1073741823/5000
;; My number: 12.
;; Your number:
-- OpenMCL ccl/level-1/l1-numbers.lisp
%
Lisp hackers have to be bound (to-do 'it).
%
A fully declared Common Lisp program is as robust as assembly language.
%
Read my Lisp! No Gnu Faxes!
%
XML is the Lisp of the 90s.
%
> What's so great about the lambda calculus?
In a profession plagued by, "when all you have is a hammer, everything
looks like a nail," we get really excited when someone is able to come
along and prove that everything really *is* a nail if lambda is the
hammer.
-- brlewis@my-deja.com
%
You're posting to a Scheme group. Around here, arguing that Java is
better than C++ is like arguing that grasshoppers taste better than
tree bark.
-- Thant Tessman <thant@acm.org> in comp.lang.scheme
%
> Can we quote you on that?
A long time ago, someone in the Lisp industry told me it was poor form
quote people; it suggests that they lack value.
-- Kent M Pitman <pitman@world.std.com> in comp.lang.lisp
%
> What's so great about the lambda calculus?
In a profession plagued by, "when all you have is a hammer, everything
looks like a nail," we get really excited when someone is able to come
along and prove that everything really *is* a nail if lambda is the
hammer.
-- brlewis@my-deja.com
%
You're posting to a Scheme group. Around here, arguing that Java is
better than C++ is like arguing that grasshoppers taste better than
tree bark.
-- Thant Tessman <thant@acm.org> in comp.lang.scheme
%
> Can we quote you on that?
A long time ago, someone in the Lisp industry told me it was poor form
quote people; it suggests that they lack value.
-- Kent M Pitman <pitman@world.std.com> in comp.lang.lisp
%
If you give someone Fortran, he has Fortran.
If you give someone Lisp, he has any language he pleases.
-- Guy L. Steele Jr.
%
maybe you can revive the lisp used in the old "abuse" game? (i'd offer
pointers, but i'm sort of afraid of typing "lisp abuse" into a search
engine. :-)
-- thi <ttn@netcom.com> in comp.lang.lisp
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Parentheses? What parentheses? I haven't noticed any parentheses
since my first month of Lisp programming. I like to ask people who
complain about parentheses in Lisp if they are bothered by all the
spaces between words in a newspaper...
-- Kenny Tilton <tilt@liii.com>
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I am reminded of Gregor Kiczales at ILC 2003 displaying some AspectJ to
a silent crowd, pausing, then plaintively adding, "When I show that to
Java programmers they stand up and cheer."
-- Kenny Tilton <ktilton@nyc.rr.com>
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If you learn Lisp correctly, you can grok all programming styles with
it: procedural, OO, predicate, functional, pure or full of
side-effects. Recursion will be your friend, function references your
allies, you will truly know what a closure is, and that an argument
stack is actually a performance hack. You will see that the most
elegant way to solve a problem is to create a custom language, solve
the generic problem, and have your specific one fall out as a special
case. You will learn to truly separate intent from the bare metal, and
you will finally understand the two deepest secrets, which are really
the same secret, which we tell all, but so few understand, that code
and data are the same thing, but organize your data and your code will
follow.
-- Mark Atwood, rec.arts.sf.written, Jan 2002
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I guess, when you're drunk, every woman looks beautiful and every
language looks (like) a Lisp :)
--- Lament, #scheme@freenode.net
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Infrequently Asked Questions about Common Lisp
Q: Is CDR coding useful?
A: Programs written in CDR coding style may be faster, especially on hardware
with CDR coding support.
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Infrequently Asked Questions about Common Lisp
Q: What is CDR coding?
A: CDR coding is programming style where programs looks like this (incomplete)
example:
(CDR (CDR (CDR (CDR (CDR (CDR (CDR (CDR (CDR (CDR (CDR (CDR
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Infrequently Asked Questions about Common Lisp
Q: Why doesn't (sort my-variable) update the variable?
A: The default calling convention in Common Lisp is call by value, so it
can't modify arguments passed into a function. Use the appropriate compiler
switch to make it call by reference.
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Infrequently Asked Questions about Common Lisp
Q: What's a 'special variable'?
A: Some variables have values that must be accessed very quickly. They are
stored in memory that is connected to the CPU by a high speed datapath called
'the short bus'. Special variables ride the short bus.
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SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen
where one spends more time thinking than typing.
-- Phillip Greenspun
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Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average
programmers. It's a perfectly legitimate goal to design a language for
average programmers. (Or for that matter for small children, like Logo.) But
it is also a legitimate, and very different, goal to design a langauge for
good programmers.
-- Paul Graham
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In Lisp, if you want to do aspect-oriented programming, you just do a bunch of
macros and you're there. In Java, you have to get Gregor Kiczales to go out
and start a new company, taking months and years and try to get that to work.
Lisp still has the advantage there, it's just a question of people wanting
that.
-- Peter Norvig
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LISP has survived for 21 years because it is an approximate local optimum in
the space of programming languages.
-- John McCarthy (1980)
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And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were
after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to
Lisp. Aren't you happy?
-- Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs (about Java)
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No language feels more natural than Lisp. There's a real sense that while
Python was invented by a brilliant programmer, Lisp is built into of the
structure of the Universe.
-- Anonymous
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I can't escape the sensation that I have already been thinking in Lisp all my
programming career, but forcing the ideas into the constraints of bad
languages, which explode those ideas into a bewildering array of details,
most of which are workarounds for the language.
-- Kaz Kylheku
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I have heard more than one LISP advocate state such subjective comments as,
"LISP is the most powerful and elegant programming language in the world"
and expect such comments to be taken as objective truth. I have never heard
a Java, C++, C, Perl, or Python advocate make the same claim about their own
language of choice.
-- Slashdot post
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There are no average Lisp programmers. We are the Priesthood. Offerings of
incense or cash will do.
-- Kenny Tilton
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Common Lisp people seem to behave in a way that is akin to the Borg: they
study the various new things that people do with interest and then find that
it was eminently doable in Common Lisp all along and that they can use
these new techniques if they think they need them.
-- Erik Naggum
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Q: How can you tell when you've reached Lisp Enlightenment?
A: The parentheses disappear.
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More than anything else, I think it is the ability of Lisp programs to
manipulate Lisp expressions that sets Lisp apart. And so no one who has
not written a lot of macros is really in a position to compare Lisp to
other languages. When I hear people complain about Lisp's parentheses,
it sounds to my ears like someone saying: "I tried one of those bananas,
which you say are so delicious. The white part was ok, but the yellow
part was very tough and tasted awful."
-- Paul Graham
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Although my own previous enthusiasm has been for syntactically rich languages,
like the Algol family, I now see clearly and concretely the force of Minsky's
1970 Turing Lecture, in which he argued that Lisp's uniformity of structure
and power of self reference gave the programmer capabilities whose content was
well worth the sacrifice of visual form.
-- Robert Floyd, Turing Award Lecture, 1979
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[antifuchs] Mean PHP core function name length: 13.67
[antifuchs] "yeah, but what's the standard error?" (-:
[dan-b] the standard error is to use PHP, I think
%
[Xophe] minion, reply to alemmens' survey!
[minion] does torturing a poor bot with things beyond its
comprehension please you?
%
[nyef] Hrm... a 50-line file, and I suspect that 13 lines of it
say that I'm completely insane.
[antifuchs] nyef: so what? 37 say that you're the exact opposite (-:
[wnewman] Maybe 37 say he's a pleasant kind of insane, and 13 say
that he's a SBCL/x86 calling convention kind.
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[Luke] I have a small program that has been looking "basically right"
for about two days, but has never worked,
and I find fundamental problems with it every few hours :)
%
[slothrop] it's tough to build apparently
[slothrop] cmucl, I mean
[wnewman] I did finally figure out how to do it, in my own way.
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[dan-b] it would be nice if more people knew the difference
between i.e. and e.g.
[wnewman] If you write the canonical web browser to displace
Internet Explorer, and name it Evil Genius, then for at
least fifteen minutes afterwards you should have a good
conversational excuse to remind people of the
difference.
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[ingvar] Modelling forest damage by storms with egular expressions is... a curious idea.
[Xach] before: ||| after: //_
[Xach] seems easy enough to me
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[frodef] wow, someone wrote ext2fs reading for movitz.. so now movitz can
be confused about logical pathnames too..
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[Xof] I just delivered my first Lisp application
[Xof] thank you, clx hackers, mcclim hackers, climacs hackers.
[Xof] sbcl hackers
[Xof] hmm, all of those are me :-)
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[sdschulze] In the Hurd, you'll be able to write filesystems in Lisp.
[sdschulze] You can already write /dev/zero in Scheme.
[sdschulze] IIRC
[ayrnieu] how useful!
[sdschulze] and Ruby and Python
[Xof] I'm not going to be sarcastic at this point. I am simply going to hold
my head in my hands and say a short, silent prayer for humanity
[sdschulze] More complex filesystems are being discussed.
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[gusl] btw, do you know which symbol returns the result of the last evaluation?
[Xof] *
[gusl] great
[gusl] and what was the other one which returns the function it's in?
[Xof] -ENOSENSE
[gusl] thanks, Xof. This will help me a lot in debugging.
[gusl] what does the ENOSENSE part mean, btw?
[jdz] gusl: it means that the question does not compute
[gusl] jdz: but his answer was right
[gusl] - is what I was looking for
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[dan-b] premature standardization is the root of all Java
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[dan_b] did I already say "gah identd gah gah" lately?
[sshields] it bears repeating
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[fph] slime must be newer than sbcl to work
[salkin] fph: that sounds like a good heuristic :)
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[rtoy] It does make me wonder how the cmucl wizard(s) bootstrapped the dd-struct (?) thing to use defstruct. There's a scary comment that you're on your own if you change it.
[salex] have to love comments like that
[Xophe] yeah. I think they bootstrapped that from maclisp
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"Lisp is the cockroach of programming languages: it'll be the only one left
after the apocalypse."
-- Paul Snively
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"I'm starting to see why so many Lisp users seem so damn smug."
-- Dave Fayram
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