Monday, July 01, 2002
Sold! (Tenatively)
The past two and a half weeks that Condo Conner has been up for sale have been interesting. I've resisted writing about it here on the off chance that it may scare off a potential buyer (how ever unlikely that is). But over the weekend I got an incredible offer on the place. I signed my end of the acceptance and the buyer is expected to sign off tomorrow. If so, the closing will be at the end of this month.
Woo hoo!
(l (i (s (p () (i (s () (f (u (n)))))))))
My first exposure to Lisp was in the summer of '86
in an introductory class on artificial intelligence. My
impression of the language was that it was mildly interesting but littered
with CARs,
CDRs
and parentheses. Lots of
parentheses.
It also doesn't bode well when a typical fragment of Lisp looks like:
(DEFUN VALID-RANGE (LIST)
(IF (NUMBERP (CAR LIST))
(LET ((MIN (CAR LIST)) ;gets SETQed below
(MAX (CAR LIST))) ;gets SETQed below
(DO ((ELS (CDR LIST) (CDR ELS)))
((NULL ELS)
(LIST MIN MAX))
(LET ((CAND (CAR ELS)))
(COND ((NOT (NUMBERP CAND))
(RETURN 'INVALID))
;; at most one of the next
;; two cases can occur.
((< CAND MIN) (SETQ MIN CAND)) ((> CAND MAX)
(SETQ MAX CAND))))))
'INVALID))
Someone well versed in Lisp would be able to see what that does (much like
someone well versed in Perl would be able to tell what $data =~
m/^211\s+\d+\s+(\d+)\s+(\d+)\s/; does—maybe).
But after reading Paul Graham's article about using Lisp for web-based applications and hearing the remark that XML is nothing more than Lisp in drag, I figured it may be time to give Lisp another look.
The two major dialects of Lisp today are Scheme and Common Lisp. Since Scheme is conceptually simpler and cleaner than Common Lisp, I decided to give it a try. The MIT version requires one to already have the MIT version installed before you can install the MIT version (and that's another lovely feature about Lisp—recursion to an infinite degree (or until you run out of memory)).
Off to try Common Lisp.
Oddly enough, the CMUCommon Lisp also requires an installation of CMUCommon Lisp before you can install CMUCommon Lisp.
Lovely.
Fortunately, Gnu (which itself is a recursive ancronym) has both a version of Scheme and Common Lisp that don't require a pre-existing installation to install.
Another thing I've come to realize is that Lisp, much like C++, accreted features over it's current 54 year history so quite a bit of arcana is needed to successfully write programs in it. Then again, the principles underlying Lisp are so simple that, like Forth, one can implement a Lisp system (functioning, if limited) in a few days of work so maybe that's the way I should proceed.
I guess he'll make peeing on hydrants legal …
His official campaign bio describes Percy as a compassionate conservative who takes a hard-line with social parasites, particularly fleas and worms. His past is free of sex scandals, due to “timely neutering.”
Via CamWorld, Dog Runs for Office in Florida
In Cerebus, creator Dave Sim had Cerebus run as Prime Minister against a goat.
It was a very close race.
Now in real life, we have someone running against a dog.
Life is stranger than fiction. Heck, life is getting stranger than satire and that's saying something.
