Viewing profile — johncowan

That raises a more general point. When you can't or don't have compile-time checks, removing run-time checks in production amounts to wearing your seat belt only when driving aroun…

> there is no guarantee that [syscall stability] will last forever even in Linux given the latest attacks That's true, but what of it? Linus won't last forever, Linux won't last fo…

I remember the first time I heard of someone being fired for buying IBM, a thing that many people thought would never happen.

Not the case. Anyway, it's not about being quarrelsome, it's about having a different point of view. As for compromise, it's hard to compromise between strictness vs. laxness, for …

Not if it's so constraining to the implementer that you can't get any implementations. Nobody's paying us to do this stuff.

Damn, my emoji got eaten. See https://emojipedia.org/chair .

Sorry, not sorry. Here's one for you: .

We have had four models: Committee consensus took us up through R5RS. There were about 30 members of the committee, though obviously some were more active than others. The problem …

Alas, no. There are quite a few other things that are needed in what is now being called the Foundations in order for adding features to be done through libraries. Scheme, like oth…

Racket is not an extension of Chez; Chez is an implementation language for Racket (it replaces most of the C code in earlier versions). See my comment above about implementation la…

Or more simply https://github.com/johnwcowan/r7rs-spec/tree/errata/rnrs , where you can get Every Scheme Standard Evar. It's unsurprising that there is no one place for R7RS-large,…

The issue is that lots of languages don't make complex numbers part of what Lispers call the numeric tower, fully integrated into numeric operations, even if there is a complex lib…

For "precisely" read "correctly". Unless the implementation language is exposed to users of the implemented language, it doesn't matter what the implementation language is. gfortra…

Which of course cannot be done portably except by drastic restrictions like "never add a number greater than MAXINT / 2 and never multiply a number greater than sqrt(MAXINT)".

Racket is far and away the most popular Scheme (and I reject the claim that it is not Scheme).

Very well said. A fourth group is people maintaining existing user code (including libraries), who also want backward compatibility.

Lisp is 65 years old and its future will be longer than its past! Another way to look at a fast-moving industry is that it's all hype and flutter with the occasional solid achievem…

If you really want to undo the Cambrian explosion, you will get Fortran and Lisp. A better SQL, Prolog, and something like Haskell might also be useful/necessary.

On the other hand, a theorem prover written by John McCarthy in 1958 was trivially adaptable to both Common Lisp and Scheme. Not too many languages get to make that claim.

If you mean me, I am definitely not a human sacrifice. I walked away because I had had enough.

I'm the ex(1) troglodyte in question. I don't use custom aliases, because I have had all editing tasks hardwired into my brain for decades, ever since I dropped Teco for ed and the…

Memory is a finite resource too, but would you force your students to run all their programs in 12K of memory, just because that was how much memory I had in the machine I learned …

SQL is no/low-code compared to using a low-level database like BDB for a given level of power. And yet it's much simpler for most use cases. By the same token, C is low-code compar…

There's a tradition of skullduggery-related names: Guile, Gambit, Gauche, Heist, Larceny (with variants Petit Larceny and Common Larceny), Racket, and Stalin (it optimizes your cod…

Developed by Kent Dybvig, sold to Chez which did who-knows-what with it (hiring Dybvig as well) but never commercialized it directly, and then open-sourced by Cisco.