Viewing profile — lapsed_lisper

I've worked on projects with people who've insisted on these approaches, and I've never understood how this secures things in any deep way. As I understand the reasoning, open("/a/…

A while ago I stumbled across a technique for improving stream buffering that I wish more I/O library implementors knew about. Korn and Vo's sfio library (circa 1991) had a feature…

Re: obtaining a legal copy of Genera, as of 2023 Symbolics still existed as a corporate entity and they continued to sell x86-64 laptops with "Portable Genera 2.0". I bought one fr…

I don't know about the Unix certification process itself, but the Single Unix Specification explicitly mentions case-insensitivity among non-conforming file system behaviors that a…

And then, since the type NIL is a subtype of all types, it's a subtype of CHARACTER. So because the type STRING is the union of all array types whose element type is a subtype of C…

Yes, in Common Lisp, NIL is a value (it's a symbol, and by convention also the empty list). But when used as a type specifier, NIL denotes the empty set. So no Lisp object is of th…

I worked in Perl for ~2.5 years in the mid-2000s. It wasn't the language for me, but I liked, respected, and am still friends with colleagues who loved it. However, I was always du…

IDK how much this matters, but the Common Lisp standard doesn't mandate tail call elimination. So although many implementations offer it (usually as a compiler thing), it's concept…

I used to think this, but now mostly (but weakly) don't. Long options buy expressiveness at the cost of density, i.e., they tend to turn "one-liners" into "N-liners". One-liners ca…

Among conceptually Unix-like OSes, at least one tried to do something along these lines: see http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/SR10/011021-A00_Using_Yo... PDF pp 151 and followin…

Unix's standard error is definitely not the first invention of a sink for errors. According to Doug McIlroy, Unix got standard error in its 6th Edition, released in May 1975 ( http…

S-expressions only really address a smallish part of what people seem to want out of configuration file syntaxes: a simple, recursive syntax. Among the things that S-expressions do…

ISTM one could use the same premises to reach the opposite conclusion, namely, that because awk is basically a subset of Perl (excluding CPAN, of course), many things are easier to…

Right, good questions. Pure conjecture on my part: maybe it's just that 36 is the smallest integral multiple of 6 that also had enough bits to represent integers of the desired wid…

If you're keen to go down the wikipedia hole, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code and then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCD_(character_encoding) explain that IBM …

Does it really make that much difference if comments exist "inside" the embedded sublanguage vs. "outside"? After all, you can always construct a format specification by string con…

Out of curiosity, how often do you find yourself using CL-PPCRE's S-expression notation? (This is a genuine question: I've never felt a desire for an S-expression notation for regu…

Richard P. Gabriel (one of the co-creators of Common Lisp, later a founder of the Lisp vendor, Lucid) has a few interesting things to say about CL's FORMAT in his Patterns Of Softw…

IMO, the bad parts Unix are of two semi-distinct kinds: the skin-deep kind, and the genetic defects. The superficial problems are everywhere, easy to spot, and fun to complain abou…