Isn't this guy a little attractive and built to be a scientist at MIT? No scientist that looks like that and creates a new form of matter can get away without becomming a superhero/villian through some bizarre mixup in an experiment.
Wherever you go to get your degree, there you are.
$ find . -name *.c -or -name *.h -exec grep "belong here" {} \;
I'm sure OpenBSD is perfect and entirely free of frivolous comments, unlike all these untrustworthy operating systems that are inexplicably more popular than it.
Your sarcasm suggests that popularity is a good indicator of quality; so I guess you're referring to Microsoft Windows as the paragon of trustworthy computing?
Maybe they could try something like this with anti-particles, rather than fusing regular protons. I suppose they will need to use dilithim crystals rather than lithium tantalite.
I belive Apple has stated that MacOS (on Intel) will not be allowed to run on any hardware other than their own. I suppose this will be achieved by a combination of hardware differences (theres much more to a computer than the CPU) and by software licensing (and enforcement).
In connection with terrorists, the L.A. County lieutenant's testimony refers only to counterfeit clothing and cigarettes. What he was really referring to in those cases is organized crime, but they once searched a home where the people said they were sympathetic to Hezbollah. Another time, some criminal suspect at a clothing store was booked, and he had a Hezbollah tattoo. No specific terrorist link was found in either case, though.
He tries to tie in music copyrights (cassette tapes in the 1980s) by mentioning that once upon a time his police department worked on some piracy cases, two decades ago. But there was no connection to terrorists there, just ordinary crime. He also mentioned that many other counterfeit items such as "motorcycles, auto parts, memory chips, software, consumer electronics, and of most concern, pharmaceuticals", which are being manufactured somewhere in the world at this very moment. But that's just a laundry list, and apparently their Sheriff's department did not even actually work on any such cases. Much less make any tie-in to terrorists.
He concludes his testimony by saying that his police team could use some more money, and perhaps since terrorism is a problem, Congress might decide there's some kind of link between all this copyright infringement that has been in the news lately and terrorism. Specifically, he suggests increase the import tariffs on containers being shipped into the port of Los Angeles, and giving the money to his department. (I always thought this was the job of Customs and the FBI, but I guess the local police wish they were doing it.)
But his department would not be looking for terror weapons; they would be looking for counterfeit cigarettes and clothing and stuff. Maybe DVDs, except I doubt that those are shipping into Los Angeles. I was under the impression that DVDs were generally shipped from Los Angeles. And that they still had the timecodes on the prints to prove it.
I don't remember learning about two different mutually exclusive creation stories.
The older story (which comes later in the book, Genesis 2:4) doesn't say anything about "In the beginning..." or how the earth came to be. It just says, "Once upon a time, God made the earth and heavens. It didn't rain on earth." Then it immediately tells how God made the man (from dust, breathing into his nostrils) and plunked him down in Eden. But "it was not good that the man should be alone", so he created the animals. But Adam was lonely, so then God made Eve. The newer story (Genesis 1:20) is the one with "In the beginning" and the "days", and it says that all the living creatures happened on the sixth day. It doesn't give any details (no putting Adam to sleep and taking his rib). It simply notes that God made animals first, then he created "man in his own image...male and female".
These two versions of the stories were written by different people at different times. The later version (a re-cap of the original story) has the mystical "seven days", but doesn't bother with any details about people. When it gets to that part, it just says, "Then God made people, and he put them in charge." (And, "Good job, if I say so Myself; time for a nap!")
Genesis (and Exodous and Numbers) each had multiple authors, as seen by the writing styles. In Genesis, the original creation story was written by "the Yahwist", and is more poetic. The second version of the story (which appears first in the book) was written by the "Author of the Priestly Code". The Priest had a different focus on which parts of the story were most important, and was more like a lawyer of mystical symbolism and order. The Priest doesn't seem to care about the exact order of animals/man/woman, but he wants to get that magical "7" days in there. And he wants to be able to cite God as demanding a Sabbath by way of example. His main point is that God went to a lot of trouble to create the world, then he turned it over to humans (in His Image) to take care of.
Whether you think that's two different contradictory stories or not is a matter of opinion. They might seem that way to someone who was reading it all in an extremely literal way and not realizing that it was two different people telling the stories for different reasons at different times.
Some people say they "literally believe" every word. Some other people say, "Well, the words are literally contradictory". This suggests to me that, for one thing, the fundamentalist Christians and the anti-Christian critics do not even agree on the what "literal reading" means (never mind what "theory" means). Anyway, do the Intelligent Design proponents say that they are literal believers? I thought they mostly did not, which makes this whole point of discussion something of a strawman argument cooked up by the side that is trying to claim the high ground of "logic".
I agree that the kid (presumably) who wrote that comment was off-base in guessing how people have felt about the sign over time, rather than living through it. He also related that the CITGO sign was considered no longer useful for the oil company was considered for removal "last year". But that was actually back in 1983.
The CITGO sign was renovated last fall, by the way: it's no longer neon, but is now LEDs.
He also went on to tell me he believed in the great flood and that the bible talks about life on other planets, and how those aliens came to earth and impregnated our women to form the scourage that was wiped clean with said flood.... but like I said, I respect the man deeply.
The bible does talk about those alien beings, but it doesn't quite say "planets" (they're fallen angels or something). The resulting mutant offspring were the giants; see for example Genesis 6:4.
But... if he wasn't making type errors, then why would he have build time issues with static type-checking? I suppose I might be missing something, but what?
Without reading the study, I would suppose that his "build-time" issues were that he was unable to compile his program without first having to waste time running around making all the type declarations first. When you're experimenting with the design, that's a lot of overhead. (This is the philosophical departure from those who favor static languages.)
As you really nail things down, as a final consistency and safety check on your code, you might like to go back and cast some things in stone and do some more static type-checking. (This would be done much later in the development process than you might think.) You could easily add this feature to Lisp, by the way, without changing the existing language. I think this could be done with some relatively simple macros (you've already got access to features in the compiler such as code walking, call trees, etc.) Lisp never forces you to do anything like that, and in practice, Lisp programmers find that by the time they get to that point, it's not needed. That is, the anecdotal claim is that their programs don't have any type bugs.
My personal experience over the years is that the large Lisp programs that I've worked on have not had any type bugs, either. (Well, of course I mean that in years of continuous execution by many users, no such errors manifested themselves.) The small programs didn't have type bugs either. YMMV.
Also, Lisp does allow you to make type declarations on your functions, and good Lisp compilers can do considerable type inferencing and checking.
It feels absurd for modern programmers to use a language which cannot detect that a function is missing, unless you run the program. Or for which a string multiplication with a float is just fine.
Lisp complains at compile-time when you write a call to a non-existant function.
Lisp complains at compile-time if it can prove that you are passing an invalid type. (But since it's dynamic, this applies only to built-in functions and user functions that have type information on them. It does not apply to calls where the function to be applied is computed dynamically, of course.) Good Lisp compilers do some pretty fancy type inferencing.
Your suggestion that your Lisp applications will compile without any problems even if you have misspelled function names, forgotten to include necessary source files, or that no type checking has been done at all, does not match reality.
What is absurd is for modern programmers to use a language which cannot detect that a function might be supplied later in the development process. Or for which a data type has not yet been cast in stone.
Furthermore, it is absurd to use languages in which the program will crash in a useless fashion (eg. dump core) when something goes wrong, rather than being able to detect that something has gone wrong and provide an easy way to implement some (automatic or manual intervention) recover strategy. One reason that Lisp is good for certain classes of critical programs is because it has dynamic features like that.
There are some ideas from other languages that could be added to Lisp (layered into it) to make it even better, but let's not imagine crazy things like Lisp not knowing whether or not all your program is present at compilation time.
You also suggest that Lisp is strictly "bottom up" because you have to test each component before proceeding. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The original poster, whose terminology you were defending, is from the USA (Michigan), not from Canada. We called him on his bullshit remark, and when you jumped in to defend him, we missed the fact that you were from Canada.
"clisp" is the name of one implementation of ANSI Common Lisp. There are many implementations of ANSI Common Lisp, and each of them has its own proprietary extensions. "clisp" is unusual in that it is an interpreter (rather than a compiler).
If you're asking how to manipulate OS processes in Common Lisp in general, the answer is that it is not defined by the ANSI standard. (The reason for this is that each operating system has a different idea what a "process" is, what you can do with them and how you do it, some operating systems don't have processes at all, etc. Processes are beyond the scope of the ANSI standard.) So each implementation does it slightly differently.
The leading commercial implementations, in particular, have all these kinds of facilities, and they are portable across operating systems (Mac, Unix, Windows). So if you write your program to those APIs, your program will run on all operating systems.
If you really meant "clisp", and you want to use their proprietary interface for this, then refer to the documentation entitled, "Implementation Notes". These notes are not about the internals of how clisp is implemented, but rather about the implementation-specific extensions to the language. (That label on their documentation confused me!) These notes come with your clisp distribution.
If that's not acceptable, because you didn't mean "clisp", or you really need portability not just across operating systems, but also across different vendors' implementations of Common Lisp, people have written libraries which give you portable APIs to things like process manipulation (and network sockets, multiprocessing, and so on).
These kinds of libraries are much easier to write in Lisp than in other languages. However, I don't know where to get the particular portability library (process manipulation) that you are seeking. I wrote my own. Maybe they are harder to find because it's so easy for people to write their own, but then people don't want to publish them for free. (Or maybe most people are just not writing programs that do a lot of process manipulation. Or they're happy with the non-portability of their programs and consider whatever solution they're using to be "practical" enough.)
Anyway, here are some links to places I'd recommend exploring. I don't know if they've got what you want burried in there or not.
A third solution to your problem, and maybe this is what you're looking for, is that you can just make Unix (or other C-language compatible) calls yourself directly from Common Lisp. The portability library for this is
UFFI, the "Universal Foreign Function Interface". You will have to write a function-prototype for the function that you want to call. There might be issues with Unix signals or something. Your code will run in pretty much any ANSI Common Lisp implementation, on any operating system. (The not-yet-identified-maybe-hypothetical portability library for doing process/pid manipulation would itself be written using UFFI library. Not sure if anyone bothered. Extensive libraries for things like SQL database access has been written using UFFI, also.)
Not having a comprehensive one-stop shopping place for libraries and OS interfaces is one of the things lacking in Common Lisp. Java and Perl have done a somewhat better job in that area, so far.
Some other good places to look around for libraries and solutions are:
He confused quote with backquote and supplied multiple arguments rather than providing a single list of arguments, but
He used the syntax foo(...) rather than (foo...),
which is a fundamental confusion of the syntax. He also didn't understand the syntax for creating a list, or that the function he called wanted a single object as its argument. Your suggestion that he confused quote and backquote is probably true. (However, either quote or backquote could be used in exactly the same way as each other, to construct the list that he should have written. Apparently you don't know about backquote, either.)
cadr(`yes `no `maybe)
My observation that he got all the syntax wrong, but his confusion really seems more extensive than that. He did, however, seem to understand that you can pick out the second element of a list with the CADR function.
My "What's that supposed to mean?" remark was intended to point out that his joke about Lisp being practical (the punchline being "NO"), was coming from someone who doesn't know how to program in Lisp at all.
I suppose if someone doesn't know anything about Lisp and is unwilling to learn (perhaps by reading the book being reviewed here) then programming in Lisp would indeed be impractical. So I guess his message was self-consistently true.
(cadr '(yes no maybe)) is the same as (car (cdr '(yes no maybe))). You can also use things cddr, caddr
You don't need to try to lecture me about Lisp basics. I know that you can compose CAR and CDR combinations in Lisp. I've been programming in Lisp for a very long time (longer than most people reading this have been alive). But no good programmer, in about the last couple of decades, would tend to write those combinations in order to pick out the second element of a list. CAR and CDR are for emphasizing that you are manipulating individual cons cells (eg. nodes in a tree).
Instead, to show that you are selecting an element from a linear list, one would write (second '(yes no maybe)).
And of course, with respect to the question at hand, that would be wrong.
Scheme and Common Lisp are both dialects of Lisp. They're not the same language, but if you grok one, you can pretty easily figure out the other.
Not quite. People who have been taught Scheme are almost universally baffled when they encounter Common Lisp. (Part of this bafflement is because certain fundamental ideas are so different, and yet the languages both have parenthesis, and they were told that they had been taught "Lisp".) I have less experience with people going in the other direction (Common Lisp to Scheme), but I would expect some similar confusion, if they were not forewarned.
There is no definition of what "Lisp" is. When people try to come up with one, it seems to defy any useful non-vague definition. If you look to the heritage of Common Lisp and Scheme, they were both developed by the same community, and they have some similarities. But Scheme comes from a radical faction of the community, and eschews many of the fundamental characteristics of previous Lisps; Common Lisp mostly just refines those older characteristics.
One big hint that a language is not Lisp is when it calls itself something other than "Lisp". Scheme deliberately self-identifies as something different. That doesn't mean that they aren't related, though.
I would call Scheme a dialect of Lisp, but it's also fair to argue that it is "not Lisp". It is perhaps as closely (or even more closely) related to Algol, than to its predecessor Lisp dialects. (This is even hinted at by the homage that Scheme's defining "report" document is patterned after the Algol report.) Whether statements about Scheme being Lisp or not are "true" is entirely a religous matter. Scheme and Common Lisp really are very different - the fundamental ideas and techniques used to write programs are quite different. Aside from the parenthesis syntax, and the availability of a built-in linked-list data type, they have very little in common. The languages are used by different kinds of people with different ways of thinking and diametrically opposed aesthetics and priorities. The languages were created for entirely different purposes. Proponents of each language like to claim that theirs is "Lisp", and they are naturally upset when the other side tries to sell you a different religion with the same name as theirs. And that's the only reason that it "matters" what "Lisp" is.
(That's just my opinion. I've been programming almost exlusively in Lisp for the past 25 years, and was part of the hacker community at MIT where these languages originated.)
Your message certainly looks like a troll.
Is this like the messages I sometimes get that say, "This message is not spam!!"?
Your brief description of Lisp is factually wrong and quite misleading.
Could you tell us about the Lisp software that you claim to have developed?
AJWM:
Airplane, Single-Engine, and Land are all ratings that can apply to a license. If somebody is licensed to fly airplanes, helicopters, gyrocopters and gliders with multiple engines (okay, except gliders), on land or sea, are you really going to string it out to PP-AHGGSMLS ??
No, those are (category and class) ratings on a certificate. Abbreviations are not used on the certificate; it's all fully spelled out and listed seperately. Maybe you've never seen one; you would know this if you looked at the one you claim to posess. And when people do colloquially use the abbreviations, they write them like: "PP-AS/MEL, IA, G" meaning: "Private Pilot, Airplane, Single/Multi-Engine Land, Instruments (airplanes), Gliders". Sometimes people say "PVT" instead of "PP".
AJWM:
The air regulations are the same for all
No, there are some parts in common, but they're not all the same: there are different regulations that pertain to airplanes, helicopters, and baloons, for example; and ultralight aircraft such as the AirScooter are covered by entirely seperate regulations. (See for example my other post where I corrected your misunderstandings about altitude restrictions pertaining to aircraft such as the AirScooter.)
AJWM:
At 500 feet above the highest obstacle, (1000 feet over a built up area), the skies are open
That's not quite how it works for ultralight aircraft. The rule you are citing pertains to "congested" areas (most people live in such an area). But that rule is for certified aircraft; ultralight aircraft such as the AirScooter are covered under a different set of regulations. Ultralights can't fly over a congested area (or over any open assembly of people) at any altitude.
Most people don't have to worry about any AirScooters flying over them.
Someday when we actually get flying cars, the rules will necessarily be all different.
__________ Where are the flying cars? We were promised flying cars!
If you look at the photos, you can see that this is in fact nothing more than a (very cool) personal helicopter. It's not a "car" -- it's an open cockpit, like a motorcycle -- and you can't drive on the road or anything; it does not operate on the ground at all.
It is different from a traditional tiny helicopter in its much simplified controls (and in the way the flight surfaces are actuated). And since it can legally only hold a maximum of 5 gallons of fuel, they have squeezed some good performance out of it.
I don't know what the vehicle's failure modes and safety features are. If you lose the engine, I am not sure if you can autorotate (or whether you just plummet to your death and have rotor blades flying apart and mincing nearby people and cows).
The sales hype is that since it's an Ultralight aircraft, you can fly it in unrestricted airspace without a pilot's license.
You can't commute in the AirScooter. Ultralight aircraft can only be operated in the daylight (between official sunrise/sunset), by VFR, and in decent weather (no clouds, one mile visibility minimum) -- and only for limited purposes. The regulations say "recreation or sport purposes only". I don't know if, for example, commuting to work would be considered "sport" by the FAA, but I suppose that would depend on how many other AirScooters you were competing with for the airspace. Not what they had in mind, though.
It's worth noting that there is not actually much uncontrolled airspace, unless you live in pretty rural locations. (Never mind class G airspace: you can't operate Ultralights within even the lateral boundaries of class E, which most pilots don't even notice is all over the place.) And in no case can you fly (at any altitude) over towns where people live ("congested area") or over any open-air assembly of people. So unless you have a really huge back yard, you'll have to go out in the country a little bit.
It has floats and apparently you can land it on the water. Maybe we can get the AirScooter pilots together with the WaveRunner pilots for some real action. (I expect to see this on some Amazingly Stupid Stunts video.)
Despite all the limitations, it looks like a pretty darn fun toy. I want one!
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they could try something like this with anti-particles, rather than fusing regular protons. I suppose they will need to use dilithim crystals rather than lithium tantalite.
I belive Apple has stated that MacOS (on Intel) will not be allowed to run on any hardware other than their own. I suppose this will be achieved by a combination of hardware differences (theres much more to a computer than the CPU) and by software licensing (and enforcement).
Call me back when they finally get the transporter working, so they can BEAM ME UP!!
He tries to tie in music copyrights (cassette tapes in the 1980s) by mentioning that once upon a time his police department worked on some piracy cases, two decades ago. But there was no connection to terrorists there, just ordinary crime. He also mentioned that many other counterfeit items such as "motorcycles, auto parts, memory chips, software, consumer electronics, and of most concern, pharmaceuticals", which are being manufactured somewhere in the world at this very moment. But that's just a laundry list, and apparently their Sheriff's department did not even actually work on any such cases. Much less make any tie-in to terrorists.
He concludes his testimony by saying that his police team could use some more money, and perhaps since terrorism is a problem, Congress might decide there's some kind of link between all this copyright infringement that has been in the news lately and terrorism. Specifically, he suggests increase the import tariffs on containers being shipped into the port of Los Angeles, and giving the money to his department. (I always thought this was the job of Customs and the FBI, but I guess the local police wish they were doing it.)
But his department would not be looking for terror weapons; they would be looking for counterfeit cigarettes and clothing and stuff. Maybe DVDs, except I doubt that those are shipping into Los Angeles. I was under the impression that DVDs were generally shipped from Los Angeles. And that they still had the timecodes on the prints to prove it.
(defmethod good-movie-p ((movie star-wars))
(member 'vader (characters movie)))
These two versions of the stories were written by different people at different times. The later version (a re-cap of the original story) has the mystical "seven days", but doesn't bother with any details about people. When it gets to that part, it just says, "Then God made people, and he put them in charge." (And, "Good job, if I say so Myself; time for a nap!")
Genesis (and Exodous and Numbers) each had multiple authors, as seen by the writing styles. In Genesis, the original creation story was written by "the Yahwist", and is more poetic. The second version of the story (which appears first in the book) was written by the "Author of the Priestly Code". The Priest had a different focus on which parts of the story were most important, and was more like a lawyer of mystical symbolism and order. The Priest doesn't seem to care about the exact order of animals/man/woman, but he wants to get that magical "7" days in there. And he wants to be able to cite God as demanding a Sabbath by way of example. His main point is that God went to a lot of trouble to create the world, then he turned it over to humans (in His Image) to take care of.
Whether you think that's two different contradictory stories or not is a matter of opinion. They might seem that way to someone who was reading it all in an extremely literal way and not realizing that it was two different people telling the stories for different reasons at different times.
Some people say they "literally believe" every word. Some other people say, "Well, the words are literally contradictory". This suggests to me that, for one thing, the fundamentalist Christians and the anti-Christian critics do not even agree on the what "literal reading" means (never mind what "theory" means). Anyway, do the Intelligent Design proponents say that they are literal believers? I thought they mostly did not, which makes this whole point of discussion something of a strawman argument cooked up by the side that is trying to claim the high ground of "logic".
The CITGO sign was renovated last fall, by the way: it's no longer neon, but is now LEDs.
As you really nail things down, as a final consistency and safety check on your code, you might like to go back and cast some things in stone and do some more static type-checking. (This would be done much later in the development process than you might think.) You could easily add this feature to Lisp, by the way, without changing the existing language. I think this could be done with some relatively simple macros (you've already got access to features in the compiler such as code walking, call trees, etc.) Lisp never forces you to do anything like that, and in practice, Lisp programmers find that by the time they get to that point, it's not needed. That is, the anecdotal claim is that their programs don't have any type bugs.
My personal experience over the years is that the large Lisp programs that I've worked on have not had any type bugs, either. (Well, of course I mean that in years of continuous execution by many users, no such errors manifested themselves.) The small programs didn't have type bugs either. YMMV.
Also, Lisp does allow you to make type declarations on your functions, and good Lisp compilers can do considerable type inferencing and checking.
- Lisp complains at compile-time when you write a call to a non-existant function.
- Lisp complains at compile-time if it can prove that you are passing an invalid type. (But since it's dynamic, this applies only to built-in functions and user functions that have type information on them. It does not apply to calls where the function to be applied is computed dynamically, of course.) Good Lisp compilers do some pretty fancy type inferencing.
Your suggestion that your Lisp applications will compile without any problems even if you have misspelled function names, forgotten to include necessary source files, or that no type checking has been done at all, does not match reality.What is absurd is for modern programmers to use a language which cannot detect that a function might be supplied later in the development process. Or for which a data type has not yet been cast in stone.
Furthermore, it is absurd to use languages in which the program will crash in a useless fashion (eg. dump core) when something goes wrong, rather than being able to detect that something has gone wrong and provide an easy way to implement some (automatic or manual intervention) recover strategy. One reason that Lisp is good for certain classes of critical programs is because it has dynamic features like that.
There are some ideas from other languages that could be added to Lisp (layered into it) to make it even better, but let's not imagine crazy things like Lisp not knowing whether or not all your program is present at compilation time.
You also suggest that Lisp is strictly "bottom up" because you have to test each component before proceeding. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The original poster, whose terminology you were defending, is from the USA (Michigan), not from Canada. We called him on his bullshit remark, and when you jumped in to defend him, we missed the fact that you were from Canada.
If you're asking how to manipulate OS processes in Common Lisp in general, the answer is that it is not defined by the ANSI standard. (The reason for this is that each operating system has a different idea what a "process" is, what you can do with them and how you do it, some operating systems don't have processes at all, etc. Processes are beyond the scope of the ANSI standard.) So each implementation does it slightly differently. The leading commercial implementations, in particular, have all these kinds of facilities, and they are portable across operating systems (Mac, Unix, Windows). So if you write your program to those APIs, your program will run on all operating systems.
If you really meant "clisp", and you want to use their proprietary interface for this, then refer to the documentation entitled, "Implementation Notes". These notes are not about the internals of how clisp is implemented, but rather about the implementation-specific extensions to the language. (That label on their documentation confused me!) These notes come with your clisp distribution.
If that's not acceptable, because you didn't mean "clisp", or you really need portability not just across operating systems, but also across different vendors' implementations of Common Lisp, people have written libraries which give you portable APIs to things like process manipulation (and network sockets, multiprocessing, and so on).
These kinds of libraries are much easier to write in Lisp than in other languages. However, I don't know where to get the particular portability library (process manipulation) that you are seeking. I wrote my own. Maybe they are harder to find because it's so easy for people to write their own, but then people don't want to publish them for free. (Or maybe most people are just not writing programs that do a lot of process manipulation. Or they're happy with the non-portability of their programs and consider whatever solution they're using to be "practical" enough.) Anyway, here are some links to places I'd recommend exploring. I don't know if they've got what you want burried in there or not.
A third solution to your problem, and maybe this is what you're looking for, is that you can just make Unix (or other C-language compatible) calls yourself directly from Common Lisp. The portability library for this is UFFI, the "Universal Foreign Function Interface". You will have to write a function-prototype for the function that you want to call. There might be issues with Unix signals or something. Your code will run in pretty much any ANSI Common Lisp implementation, on any operating system. (The not-yet-identified-maybe-hypothetical portability library for doing process/pid manipulation would itself be written using UFFI library. Not sure if anyone bothered. Extensive libraries for things like SQL database access has been written using UFFI, also.)
Not having a comprehensive one-stop shopping place for libraries and OS interfaces is one of the things lacking in Common Lisp. Java and Perl have done a somewhat better job in that area, so far.
Some other good places to look around for libraries and solutions are:
My "What's that supposed to mean?" remark was intended to point out that his joke about Lisp being practical (the punchline being "NO"), was coming from someone who doesn't know how to program in Lisp at all.
I suppose if someone doesn't know anything about Lisp and is unwilling to learn (perhaps by reading the book being reviewed here) then programming in Lisp would indeed be impractical. So I guess his message was self-consistently true.
You don't need to try to lecture me about Lisp basics. I know that you can compose CAR and CDR combinations in Lisp. I've been programming in Lisp for a very long time (longer than most people reading this have been alive). But no good programmer, in about the last couple of decades, would tend to write those combinations in order to pick out the second element of a list. CAR and CDR are for emphasizing that you are manipulating individual cons cells (eg. nodes in a tree).Instead, to show that you are selecting an element from a linear list, one would write (second '(yes no maybe)). And of course, with respect to the question at hand, that would be wrong.
One big hint that a language is not Lisp is when it calls itself something other than "Lisp". Scheme deliberately self-identifies as something different. That doesn't mean that they aren't related, though.
I would call Scheme a dialect of Lisp, but it's also fair to argue that it is "not Lisp". It is perhaps as closely (or even more closely) related to Algol, than to its predecessor Lisp dialects. (This is even hinted at by the homage that Scheme's defining "report" document is patterned after the Algol report.) Whether statements about Scheme being Lisp or not are "true" is entirely a religous matter. Scheme and Common Lisp really are very different - the fundamental ideas and techniques used to write programs are quite different. Aside from the parenthesis syntax, and the availability of a built-in linked-list data type, they have very little in common. The languages are used by different kinds of people with different ways of thinking and diametrically opposed aesthetics and priorities. The languages were created for entirely different purposes. Proponents of each language like to claim that theirs is "Lisp", and they are naturally upset when the other side tries to sell you a different religion with the same name as theirs. And that's the only reason that it "matters" what "Lisp" is.
(That's just my opinion. I've been programming almost exlusively in Lisp for the past 25 years, and was part of the hacker community at MIT where these languages originated.)
Of course, it's not a true story.
That isn't even a syntactically valid Lisp expression. What's it supposed to mean?
Your message certainly looks like a troll.
Is this like the messages I sometimes get that say, "This message is not spam!!"?
Your brief description of Lisp is factually wrong and quite misleading.
Could you tell us about the Lisp software that you claim to have developed?
Hurry up and download your copy now, before the price goes up!
Most people don't have to worry about any AirScooters flying over them.
Someday when we actually get flying cars, the rules will necessarily be all different.
__________
Where are the flying cars? We were promised flying cars!
It is different from a traditional tiny helicopter in its much simplified controls (and in the way the flight surfaces are actuated). And since it can legally only hold a maximum of 5 gallons of fuel, they have squeezed some good performance out of it.
I don't know what the vehicle's failure modes and safety features are. If you lose the engine, I am not sure if you can autorotate (or whether you just plummet to your death and have rotor blades flying apart and mincing nearby people and cows).
The sales hype is that since it's an Ultralight aircraft, you can fly it in unrestricted airspace without a pilot's license.
You can't commute in the AirScooter. Ultralight aircraft can only be operated in the daylight (between official sunrise/sunset), by VFR, and in decent weather (no clouds, one mile visibility minimum) -- and only for limited purposes. The regulations say "recreation or sport purposes only". I don't know if, for example, commuting to work would be considered "sport" by the FAA, but I suppose that would depend on how many other AirScooters you were competing with for the airspace. Not what they had in mind, though.
It's worth noting that there is not actually much uncontrolled airspace, unless you live in pretty rural locations. (Never mind class G airspace: you can't operate Ultralights within even the lateral boundaries of class E, which most pilots don't even notice is all over the place.) And in no case can you fly (at any altitude) over towns where people live ("congested area") or over any open-air assembly of people. So unless you have a really huge back yard, you'll have to go out in the country a little bit.
It has floats and apparently you can land it on the water. Maybe we can get the AirScooter pilots together with the WaveRunner pilots for some real action. (I expect to see this on some Amazingly Stupid Stunts video.)
Despite all the limitations, it looks like a pretty darn fun toy. I want one!