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Re: How security holes happen

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  Re: How security holes happen Chris Kaynor <ckaynor@zindagigames.com> - 2014-03-03 14:55 -0800
    Re: How security holes happen sffjunkie@gmail.com - 2014-03-04 08:41 -0800
      Re: How security holes happen Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2014-03-05 04:07 +1100
      Re: How security holes happen Skip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com> - 2014-03-04 11:16 -0600
      Re: How security holes happen Ned Batchelder <ned@nedbatchelder.com> - 2014-03-04 15:47 -0500
      Re: How security holes happen Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> - 2014-03-04 13:49 -0800
        Re: How security holes happen Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2014-03-05 00:48 +0200
          Re: How security holes happen Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2014-03-05 09:57 +1100
            Re: How security holes happen Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> - 2014-03-04 17:59 -0500
              Re: How security holes happen Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy@yahoo.co.uk> - 2014-03-04 23:16 +0000
              Re: How security holes happen Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2014-03-05 10:22 +1100
              Re: How security holes happen Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy@yahoo.co.uk> - 2014-03-04 23:40 +0000
          Re: How security holes happen Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2014-03-04 19:31 -0500
          Re: How security holes happen Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2014-03-04 19:30 -0500
            Re: How security holes happen Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> - 2014-03-04 20:57 -0500
              Re: How security holes happen MRAB <python@mrabarnett.plus.com> - 2014-03-05 04:11 +0000
                Re: How security holes happen Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2014-03-05 08:37 +0200
                  Re: How security holes happen Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> - 2014-03-05 08:26 +0000
                    Re: How security holes happen Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> - 2014-03-05 19:57 +1100
                    Re: How security holes happen Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2014-03-05 11:01 +0200
                    Re: How security holes happen "Mark H. Harris" <harrismh777@gmail.com> - 2014-03-05 06:11 -0800
                      Re: How security holes happen Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2014-03-06 02:16 +1100
                      Re: How security holes happen Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2014-03-05 19:24 -0500
                        Re: How security holes happen "Mark H. Harris" <harrismh777@gmail.com> - 2014-03-05 17:24 -0800
                          Re: How security holes happen MRAB <python@mrabarnett.plus.com> - 2014-03-06 01:40 +0000
                            Re: How security holes happen "Mark H. Harris" <harrismh777@gmail.com> - 2014-03-05 18:07 -0800
                          Re: How security holes happen Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2014-03-06 19:28 -0500
                            Re: How security holes happen "Mark H. Harris" <harrismh777@gmail.com> - 2014-03-06 17:53 -0800
                              Re: How security holes happen MRAB <python@mrabarnett.plus.com> - 2014-03-07 02:13 +0000
                                Re: How security holes happen "Mark H. Harris" <harrismh777@gmail.com> - 2014-03-06 18:39 -0800
                                  Re: How security holes happen Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2014-03-07 19:46 -0500
                              Re: How security holes happen Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2014-03-07 19:43 -0500
          Re: How security holes happen Neil Cerutti <neilc@norwich.edu> - 2014-03-05 14:19 +0000
            Re: How security holes happen Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2014-03-05 16:54 +0200
              Re: How security holes happen Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> - 2014-03-05 18:42 +0000
                Re: How security holes happen Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2014-03-06 06:00 +1100
          Re: How security holes happen Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2014-03-05 15:28 +0000
          Re: How security holes happen Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> - 2014-03-05 15:47 +0000
            Re: How security holes happen "Mark H. Harris" <harrismh777@gmail.com> - 2014-03-05 08:37 -0800

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#67848

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 2:26:12 AM UTC-6, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Mar 2014 08:37:42 +0200, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> 
> > If you had tried Python 30 years ago, you'd give it up for any serious
> > work because it would be so slow and consume so much memory.
> 
> /facepalm
>
> Python is only 23 years old, so it would have been a good trick to have 
> tried it 30 years ago. 

hi Steven,  QOTD,  I go back to the day of the MITS Altair 8800.  My 
high school had one. I was writing machine code for the Wang 700 series
programmable desk calculator, and punching in code on the Altair 8800,
with toggle switches. I'm one of the guys Bill Gates wrote his famous 
open letter to in 1976. I was there.  In 1984 the only language being used
to write *anything* in the general sphere of personal computing was either
MS DEBUG.COM (one of my favorites) or BASIC---which was ubiquitous, 
where like almost *every* computer booted directly into a BASIC interpreter,
the noted exception being the first IBM PC.

The pre-cursor to python was ABC created at CWI in about 1991. One of 
its purposes (according to Guido) was to, and I quote, "Stamp out BASIC".

My first IBM machine was the famous PCjr... booted directly into cartridge 
BASIC, or would optionally boot DOS 2.1 from 5" floppy, where I could 
run, you guessed it BASICA, using the cartridge rom,  or I could optionally
run DEBUG.COM and code up 8086 machine code (not assembler, mind you).

Well, I used my PCjr until 1992 (python was one year old, and ABC would
not run on a PC); when I purchased my 486 SX. Guess what?  ---still 
coding BASIC, DEBUG.COM... and whoohoo, Turbo Pascal........  

At IBM we were coding Rexx on the VM370 systems, and then Rexx on the
OS/2 systems; no python, and nothing much else either , oh yes, Turbo BASIC,
Visual BASIC, and of course BASICA although you could then get it as GWBASIC,
... still no python. 

Did anyone mention that PCs back in that day were toys. And I do mean toys. 
They were slow, they crashed, their graphics sucked, and your storage medium 
was a floppy disk.  Linus was working in Finland on basic... Richard Stallman was
working on GNU, Guido was working at CWI on python. The PC really didn't come
into its own (and they were still slow) until the Pentium4. Personal computers
really did not begin to really shine until about 1998 (a mere 16 years ago) when
IBM and other began to take a serious look into gnu/linux research. 

PCs were fast enough, had enough memory, and even had python. Of course
most of us were not using it... mostly C of various brands (notably MIX) and
Visual BASIC.  Quick BASIC was ubiquitous by that time, and MASM had taken
over for DEBUG.com.   Those were the days.  

There has been a resurgence of interest in BASIC today; notably Mintoris, and 
Chipmunk. But now everyone usually has some flavor of python installed on
their computer (and most don't know it) because python is being used under
the covers as a scripting language of choice. Wide adoption is still coming, 
in the future, but the future looks good for python; competing of course with
(notably) Java or Dalvik (Android Java). 

In my day computers were slide-rules. Businesses were still using Comptometers
(still being taught on my high school) and the modern age of computing 
would not occur for forty years. Trust me, thirty years ago was like the dark
ages of personal computing and python wasn't even a gleam in her daddy's eye.....

If fact, now that I think of it, Monte Python and the Holy Grail came out in 1975,
one year before the MITS Altair 8800 Bill Gates open letter, and one year after I
graduated from high school. 

{world according to me}
marcus

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#67852

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 1:11 AM, Mark H. Harris <harrismh777@gmail.com> wrote:
> My first IBM machine was the famous PCjr... booted directly into cartridge
> BASIC, or would optionally boot DOS 2.1 from 5" floppy, where I could
> run, you guessed it BASICA, using the cartridge rom,  or I could optionally
> run DEBUG.COM and code up 8086 machine code (not assembler, mind you).

My first IBM machine (first I used - the first computer I actually
personally *owned* wasn't till this century) was an Epson
XT-compatible. We had GW-BASIC and Q-BASIC, and a much superior form
of DEBUG.EXE that came with, get this, an inbuilt mini-assembler! Yes,
I could do this:

-a
xxxx:0100 mov ah,09
xxxx:0102 mov dx,0109
xxxx:0105 int 21
xxxx:0107 int 20
xxxx:0109 db "Hello, world!",13,10,24

And it'd produce the appropriate bytes. From memory, that would be B4
09 BA 09 01 CD 21 CD 20, followed by the text string. I actually used
that to write seriously-useful programs, like one that helped us keep
track of which treasures we'd picked up in Colossal Caves. (For some
definition of "seriously-useful", anyway.)

> At IBM we were coding Rexx on the VM370 systems, and then Rexx on the
> OS/2 systems; no python, and nothing much else either , oh yes, Turbo BASIC,
> Visual BASIC, and of course BASICA although you could then get it as GWBASIC,
> ... still no python.

I wasn't working at IBM itself, but when Dad switched to OS/2 for our
home business, we switched too. That would have been about 1992; we
used OS/2 2.1 briefly, but got properly into things with Warp 3
(Connect, and I can never remember whether it was red-box or blue-box
- we had the one that came with a Windows license for Win-OS/2). Ooh,
we had the most amazing fun with that... we set up, to quote my older
brother, our very own personal World Wide Web! (Not very accurate, but
that was the big buzz-word at the time, and hey, we did have a LAN.)
And over the ensuing years, we got to know which network cards were
the most reliable - mainly the Realtek ones, we had some RTL8029 cards
that went into so many different computers - and if anything went
wrong with drivers or anything, I'd pop the case and stick in one of
my stand-bys. Either that, or we'd go search for the drivers on
Hobbes, and either download 'em onto a floppy disk or LinkWiz them
across - because one of the very first things we'd put onto any
computer was the comms software that uses a special serial-port or
parallel-port cable to transfer files. Immensely useful, until generic
network drivers got better :)

> Did anyone mention that PCs back in that day were toys. And I do mean toys.
> They were slow, they crashed, their graphics sucked...

Oh no! No no no! Graphics didn't suck for everyone. Maybe they did for
you, you with the horrible CGA card plugged into your TV. Maybe they
did for the people who used the default IBM Monochrome card that
didn't do graphics at all. But no, my dad was forward-looking. He got
the best. He got a Hercules Graphics Card, capable of driving the same
screens the IBM Mono would, but giving us the tremendous capability of
720x348 monochrome graphics! It was awesome! Plus, for text colors we
had black, white, bold black, and bold white, and - get this -
underlined! Nobody else got that.

Yes, those were the days.

ChrisA

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#67896

On Thu, 6 Mar 2014 02:16:53 +1100, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
declaimed the following:


>My first IBM machine (first I used - the first computer I actually
>personally *owned* wasn't till this century) was an Epson
>XT-compatible. We had GW-BASIC and Q-BASIC, and a much superior form
>of DEBUG.EXE that came with, get this, an inbuilt mini-assembler! Yes,
>I could do this:
>

	I must have had a deprived life...

	The only "debug" on a home system I ever used was the one in LS-DOS.
And even then, it was only because an OS update disk arrived with a bad
sector and could not be copied.

	The LS-DOS debugger had a mode where it could do raw sector I/O
(including the special marker used for the directory). I did differences on
the prior OS version and the update version, skipping the bad sector. From
this, I found the main change in the affected file was the default option
for the directory command -- so I used debugger to copy the update to a
blank disk, skipping the bad sector; then used the prior version and copied
just the skipped sector to the new disk.

	That actually produced a working "update" system disk, which I used
while sending the bad disk back to LSI for replacement.


	Granted, the only OTHER debugger I've ever used is the one from
VAX/VMS.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

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#67904

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 6:24:52 PM UTC-6, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> 	I must have had a deprived life...
> 
> 	The only "debug" on a home system I ever used was the one in LS-DOS.
> And even then, it was only because an OS update disk arrived with a bad
> sector and could not be copied.

   Not many people realized what they had in front of them. The only reason you
might is if you 'grew up' on a system that required machine coding;  like the
Wang 700 series, or the MITS Altair 8800, or the VIC 20 with VicMon.

   I grew up with all three. So, before I ever learned a line of BASIC I was coding 
machine language (not assembler) on the three platforms above... the wang 
used integrated circuits, but had to processor chip;  the MITS used the very first
8080 chip from Intel, and the VIC 20 used the 6502 from Motorola. My first 
personal computer (I did not own it, it was temporarily loaned to me) was the 
VIC 20.  It only had 5k of memory, so anyone who did any real programming 
on it purchased the VicMon cartridge which was a 'machine language monitor'.
It was "DEBUG.COM" for the VIC 20. 

   When I got the first copy of DOS on floppy and saw DEBUG.COM I knew 
instantly what it was... a machine language monitor system for reading and 
writing machine code (8086 / 8088) in memory, or to disk sectors, or to disk
as a file-name.  It wasn't just a debugger---hardly! It was (and still is, yes, I 
still use it) a simple clean full-blown machine language monitor capable today
just as then, to build sophisticated applications with 1's and 0's/

   It was also my cup of tea, as it were.  The folks who used the MITS Altair 8800
hated punching code in by hand; gets old fast.  But not for me. I loved it, because
I was as interested in the 8080 processor as I was in writing programs for it; it was
great fun experimenting with memory and the processor.

   marcus

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#67906

On 2014-03-06 01:24, Mark H. Harris wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 6:24:52 PM UTC-6, Dennis Lee Bieber
> wrote:
>> I must have had a deprived life...
>>
>> The only "debug" on a home system I ever used was the one in
>> LS-DOS. And even then, it was only because an OS update disk
>> arrived with a bad sector and could not be copied.
>
> Not many people realized what they had in front of them. The only
> reason you might is if you 'grew up' on a system that required
> machine coding;  like the Wang 700 series, or the MITS Altair 8800,
> or the VIC 20 with VicMon.
>
> I grew up with all three. So, before I ever learned a line of BASIC I
> was coding machine language (not assembler) on the three platforms
> above... the wang used integrated circuits, but had to processor
> chip;  the MITS used the very first 8080 chip from Intel, and the VIC
> 20 used the 6502 from Motorola.
>
The 6502 came from MOS Technology. Motorola made the 6800.

> My first personal computer (I did not own it, it was temporarily
> loaned to me) was the VIC 20.  It only had 5k of memory, so anyone
> who did any real programming on it purchased the VicMon cartridge
> which was a 'machine language monitor'. It was "DEBUG.COM" for the
> VIC 20.
>
5K? Luxury! I started with the Science of Cambridge Mk14. Including the
RAM on the I/O chip, it had 640 bytes.

> When I got the first copy of DOS on floppy and saw DEBUG.COM I knew
> instantly what it was... a machine language monitor system for
> reading and writing machine code (8086 / 8088) in memory, or to disk
>  sectors, or to disk as a file-name.  It wasn't just a
> debugger---hardly! It was (and still is, yes, I still use it) a
> simple clean full-blown machine language monitor capable today just
> as then, to build sophisticated applications with 1's and 0's/
>
> It was also my cup of tea, as it were.  The folks who used the MITS
> Altair 8800 hated punching code in by hand; gets old fast.  But not
> for me. I loved it, because I was as interested in the 8080 processor
> as I was in writing programs for it; it was great fun experimenting
> with memory and the processor.
>

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#67908

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 7:40:05 PM UTC-6, MRAB wrote:
> 
> The 6502 came from MOS Technology. Motorola made the 6800.

    Well, not exactly. The MOS 6502 is to the Motorola 6800 what the Zilog
Z80 was to the Intel 8080.  
    The same engineers who designed the 6800 moved out and then designed
the 6502; actually ended up in a law suit of sorts--- but I don't remember the
details. Anyway, the 6502 was bought outright by Commodore, and the rest
is history with the VIC20.
    The engineers at Intel did the same thing... moved out and started Zilog
(which still exists today) and began their work on the Z80.  By the by, the Z80
is still embedded in many applications today. Although, its not on a 40 pin dip
any longer; its a small square about the size of a postage stamp. That is what 
powers the TI 84+ and the TI 83+ graphing programable calculators. I do some
machine coding on the TI 84+ because it can be done on-the-device!
    The 68000 is the motorola chip that powers the TI89 graphing programable
calculator ( my favorite ).  Its not so easy to program it with machine code, because
the kernel binaries are not well documented (TI hides them) and the user community
hasn't probed it enough to know how does it really work.

> 5K? Luxury! I started with the Science of Cambridge Mk14. Including the
> RAM on the I/O chip, it had 640 bytes.

    Oh, I know. I thought 5k was a tremendous about of memory at the time, but we
soon built and expanded for the slot, added 16k of memory (hand wire-wrapped thank
you) and then plugged the VicMon (actually HES MON) into that.
    Do you remember the IAS (Maniac) at the Institute for Advanced Study (Johnny von Neumann's
baby) ?   It only had 5k of memory too!  They had to use punched cards or punched tape 
for intermediate results when they were doing their runs calculating the wave function for
the hydrogen bomb.   At the time, Johnny said, " there will never be a need for for than
five machines like this in the whole world!"

     marcus

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#67968

On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 17:24:44 -0800 (PST), "Mark H. Harris"
<harrismh777@gmail.com> declaimed the following:


>8080 chip from Intel, and the VIC 20 used the 6502 from Motorola. My first 

	The 6502 was NOT a Motorola chip (they had the 6800).  The 6502 was MOS
Technology.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

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#67972

On Thursday, March 6, 2014 6:28:58 PM UTC-6, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> 
> 	The 6502 was NOT a Motorola chip (they had the 6800).  The 6502 was MOS

That's funny... did you not see what I wrote back to MRAB?   Here:

The MOS 6502 is to the Motorola 6800 what the Zilog Z80 was to the Intel 8080.
   
    The same engineers who designed the 6800 moved out and then designed 
the 6502; actually ended up in a law suit of sorts--- but I don't remember the 
details. Anyway, the 6502 was bought outright by Commodore, and the rest 
is history with the VIC20. 

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#67976

On 2014-03-07 01:53, Mark H. Harris wrote:
> On Thursday, March 6, 2014 6:28:58 PM UTC-6, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>>
>> 	The 6502 was NOT a Motorola chip (they had the 6800).  The 6502 was MOS
>
> That's funny... did you not see what I wrote back to MRAB?   Here:
>
> The MOS 6502 is to the Motorola 6800 what the Zilog Z80 was to the Intel 8080.
>
Not quite.

The Z80's architecture and instruction set is a superset of that of the
8080; the 6502's architecture and instruction set isn't a superset of,
or even compatible with, that of the 6800 (although it can use the same
I/O, etc, chips).

>      The same engineers who designed the 6800 moved out and then designed
> the 6502; actually ended up in a law suit of sorts--- but I don't remember the
> details. Anyway, the 6502 was bought outright by Commodore, and the rest
> is history with the VIC20.
>

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#67977

On Thursday, March 6, 2014 8:13:02 PM UTC-6, MRAB wrote:
> 
> The Z80's architecture and instruction set is a superset of that of the
> 8080; the 6502's architecture and instruction set isn't a superset of,
> or even compatible with, that of the 6800 (although it can use the same
> I/O, etc, chips).

My point is not what, but who.  Motorola engineers designed the 6502. A rose
is a rose by any other name. Its the people who count... if Motorola had listened 
to those guys, who knows ... ?  neither here nor there now, or course.

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#68014

On Thu, 6 Mar 2014 18:39:01 -0800 (PST), "Mark H. Harris"
<harrismh777@gmail.com> declaimed the following:

>On Thursday, March 6, 2014 8:13:02 PM UTC-6, MRAB wrote:
>> 
>> The Z80's architecture and instruction set is a superset of that of the
>> 8080; the 6502's architecture and instruction set isn't a superset of,
>> or even compatible with, that of the 6800 (although it can use the same
>> I/O, etc, chips).
>
>My point is not what, but who.  Motorola engineers designed the 6502. A rose
>is a rose by any other name. Its the people who count... if Motorola had listened 
>to those guys, who knows ... ?  neither here nor there now, or course.

	And ex-IBM folk created the SDS Sigma line (later the XDS Sigma)
[Scientific Data Systems -> Xerox Data Systems].

	That doesn't make my college Sigma-6 an IBM-based product (for one
thing, IBM had around 7 interrupt vectors, while the Sigma-6 had 224 or so
[it could actually assign a separate interrupt to EACH connected terminal
<G>)
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

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#68013

On Thu, 6 Mar 2014 17:53:15 -0800 (PST), "Mark H. Harris"
<harrismh777@gmail.com> declaimed the following:

>On Thursday, March 6, 2014 6:28:58 PM UTC-6, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>> 
>> 	The 6502 was NOT a Motorola chip (they had the 6800).  The 6502 was MOS
>
>That's funny... did you not see what I wrote back to MRAB?   Here:
>
	Your post sorted /after/ the one I responded to. By the time I got to
yours, mine had already been sent.

-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

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#67849

On 2014-03-05, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:48:40 +0200, Marko Rauhamaa
> <marko@pacujo.net> declaimed the following:
>>Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us>:
>>> Okay, that looks totally cool. Maybe I'll finally get a
>>> handle on LISP! :)
>>
>> Lisp is conceptually simpler than Python, but awe-inspiring.
>> One day, it will overtake Python, I believe.
>>
>
> It's already had 54 years to become a major language...
>
> Instead it has schismed into Common Lisp and Scheme (and a few
> other dialects)
>
> Granted, my experience was toying with /cassette-based/
> SuperSoft LISP on a TRS-80 Model III

Personally, I think it hasn't taken off because special forms are
harder to remember than syntax. And there are, like, *way* more
than mammals needs. And then the coolest feature of the language,
macros, is designed to let you, gulp, add more.

Well, that or lisp's designers severely underestimated how much
we like to use our programming languages as non-RPN calculators.

-- 
Neil Cerutti

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#67851

Neil Cerutti <neilc@norwich.edu>:

> Personally, I think it hasn't taken off because special forms are
> harder to remember than syntax. And there are, like, *way* more than
> mammals needs.

It hasn't taken off yet, but even mammals can evolve.

> Well, that or lisp's designers severely underestimated how much we
> like to use our programming languages as non-RPN calculators.

I don't think Lisp was really originally designed. It just came out and,
surprisingly, ran.

As for the anti-RPN notation, yes, it can be hard to get used to. Then
again, Python notation requires an initiation as well. For example:

   invoc = "{}({})".format(fname, ', '.join(repr(x) for _, x in named_args))


Marko

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#67869

On Wed, 05 Mar 2014 16:54:59 +0200, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

> I don't think Lisp was really originally designed.

The history of Lisp is described here in detail:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html

Like all complex systems, it did not appear fully-formed in a flash of 
inspiration. It was both designed and evolved through experimentation. 
That process of *trying things* and keeping those that work is usually 
called "design".


-- 
Steven D'Aprano
http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/

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#67870

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 5:42 AM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Mar 2014 16:54:59 +0200, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>
>> I don't think Lisp was really originally designed.
>
> The history of Lisp is described here in detail:
>
> http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html
>
> Like all complex systems, it did not appear fully-formed in a flash of
> inspiration. It was both designed and evolved through experimentation.
> That process of *trying things* and keeping those that work is usually
> called "design".

There's a difference between iterative design of that nature and
initial design. An initial clean design is a good basis for further
iterative design; a messy initial design means backward compatibility
shackles you. "Originally designed" is different from "constantly
worked on".

But Lisp has enough variants that the backward compat issue isn't as
major. There's no specific need for Scheme to maintain every mistake
of Common Lisp, or Clojure to support everything that elisp does.

ChrisA

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#67853

On 2014-03-04, Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> wrote:
> Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us>:
>
>> Okay, that looks totally cool. Maybe I'll finally get a handle on
>> LISP! :)
>
> Lisp is conceptually simpler than Python, but awe-inspiring. One day, it
> will overtake Python, I believe.

Seriously?

LISP had a _30_year_head_start_ yet Python is far ahead and pulling
away...

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I'm continually AMAZED
                                  at               at th'breathtaking effects
                              gmail.com            of WIND EROSION!!

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#67854

On Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:48:40 +0200, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

> Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us>:
> 
>> Okay, that looks totally cool. Maybe I'll finally get a handle on LISP!
>> :)
> 
> Lisp is conceptually simpler than Python, but awe-inspiring. One day, it
> will overtake Python, I believe.

That day was 25 years ago. According to the long-term TIOBE index, 25 
years ago Lisp was the second most popular programming language in the 
world, behind only C.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

I don't think Lisp has gotten easier, or the average programmer smarter, 
since then. The average programmer has difficulty with while loops, do 
you really think that someday they'll grok lambda calculus? *wink*

Seriously, Lisp is not only one of the oldest high-level languages 
around, being almost as old as Fortran and Cobol, but it was one of the 
biggest languages of the 1970s and even into the 80s. Companies spent 
millions developing, and using, Lisp compilers. There were even Lisp 
machines, actual hardware machines not virtual, where the CPU could 
execute Lisp instructions directly in hardware.

It did not last. It's not that the computer industry hasn't discovered 
Lisp, it is that they discovered it, gave it a solid workout for 20 
years, and then said "Nope, this isn't for us."



-- 
Steven D'Aprano
http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/

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#67856

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 9:47:40 AM UTC-6, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> Seriously, Lisp is not only one of the oldest high-level languages 
> around, being almost as old as Fortran and Cobol, but it was one of the  
> biggest languages of the 1970s and even into the 80s. 

Lisp was specified by John McCarthy (of Berkeley, CA) in 1958.  It is the second
oldest computer language behind Fortran, by one year.

There is a resurgence of interest in Lisp today (yes, not so much for common lisp) 
in the Scheme arena. The irony for AI today is that we are finally at the point 
where the technology can finally do what Alonzo Church and Alan Turing dreamed 
about. John McCarthy was *way* ahead of his time too. We are at the point where 
we are wondering again if computer science & technology in software engineering
will ever generate a "thinking" entity---self aware, creative, and of course able to
generate on it's own, "Cogito ergo sum"> 

Lisp/Scheme is awesome. But, if I want to have my little 'ol puter do some real work,
up comes IDLE and out comes a script in a couple of hours that's "awesome"!  
I still play around with gnu emacs and lisp. Its fun, educational, and truly enriching
beyond words. Check out the site, "Lambda the Ultimate" sometime:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

marcus

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