Listing to SICP lecture 1a ¹...
Ways of controlling complexity:
1. black box abstraction (reusing procedures without having to know how they are implemented)
2. conventional interfaces
1. generic operations (don’t worry about types while programming, eg. + adds all kinds of data)
2. large-scale structure and modularity
3. one metaphor for doing this: object-oriented programming (”society” of interacting things sending information to each other)
4. another metaphor for doing this operations on aggregates (streams, building systems using signal-processing like interfaces)
3. metalinguistic abstraction – making new languages (surpress some aspects and emphasize other aspects – the magic of Lisp: apply-eval-loop)
#Software
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another delayed entry, so for future use i’ll define ffti: feel free to ignore.
i hack on elisp as needed, but if i ever get a chunk of free time, i’d like to play with ansi lisp. it seems that Scheme is mainly an academic or instructional language, so ansi lisp is more appealing.
i am thinking of CMUCL, mainly because Shawn Betts (creator of ratpoison, which i still use and love) recommends it in comments concerning his new project Stump Wm.
do you have any recommendations re lisp implementation, or learning lisp in general?
– GregScott 2004-10-27 18:59 UTC
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When I tried to play with CommonLisp, I used CLISP. At the time it was the only free implementation that was UTF-8 capable (and I needed that for the game I was trying to write). I just checked, and it seems that CLISP supports Unicode 3.2.
CLiki has a page on Unicode Support, and general ramblings on Unicode and Lisp.
CMUCL has a native compiler, which might be interesting for bigger projects, but I didn’t need it.
As for learning, all I know I learnt from Graham and Norvig (see ProgrammingBooks).
– Alex Schroeder 2004-10-28 09:05 UTC
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thanks for the useful response.
– GregScott 2004-10-28 14:22 UTC