Asp Forum - Lisp Machine Flavors

rvirding

7/25/2015 12:31:00 AM

I am interested in first understanding Flavors then implementing a version of it in LFE (http...). While I have found the Lisp Machine manual on-line I have not been able to find any good examples of using Flavors. Any pointers to good example usage would be greatly appreciated.

To experiment with Flavors I have tried to run a Lisp Machine emulator, the CADR referenced in http://www.unl.... While with a bit of fiddling I can get it to compile on my Mac, with OS X 10.9.2, it crashes with an "Abort trap 6". I have managed to get it to run on an older Mac. Any help with this or pointers to alternatives would also be greatly appreciated.

Robert

31 Answers

William James

7/25/2015 1:27:00 AM

Robert Virding wrote:

> LFE (http...)

Daniel Weinreb, 24 Feb 2003:

Having separate "value cells" and "function cells" (to use
the "street language" way of saying it) was one of the most
unfortunate issues. We did not want to break pre-existing
programs that had a global variable named "foo" and a global
function named "foo" that were distinct. We at Symbolics
were forced to insist on this, in the face of everyone's
knowing that it was not what we would have done absent
compatibility constraints. It's hard for me to remember all
the specific things like this, but if we had had fewer
compatibility issues, I think it would have come out looking
more like Scheme in general.

Daniel Weinreb, 28 Feb 2003:

Lisp2 means that all kinds of language primitives have to
exist in two versions, or be parameterizable as to whether
they are talking about the value cell or function cell. It
makes the language bigger, and that's bad in and of itself.

--
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infrastructure a single grade above failure, a step from declining to the point
where everyday things simply stop working the way people expect them to. ---
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Pascal J. Bourguignon

7/25/2015 3:09:00 AM

Robert Virding <rvirding@gmail.com> writes:

> I am interested in first understanding Flavors then implementing a
> version of it in LFE (http...). While I have found the Lisp
> Machine manual on-line I have not been able to find any good examples
> of using Flavors. Any pointers to good example usage would be greatly
> appreciated.
>
> To experiment with Flavors I have tried to run a Lisp Machine
> emulator, the CADR referenced in http://www.unl.... While with
> a bit of fiddling I can get it to compile on my Mac, with OS X 10.9.2,
> it crashes with an "Abort trap 6". I have managed to get it to run on
> an older Mac. Any help with this or pointers to alternatives would
> also be greatly appreciated.

Franz documents Flavors:
http://franz.com/support/documentation/9.0/doc/f...

Now, to find sources using it, that's rather difficult.
Google has very few hits on "(require :flavor)", the most relevant being:
https://groups.google.c...!topic/comp.lang.lisp/B6Ze4jgb5OI

You'd have to find some lisp application written in the early 90's,
whose sources have been since put on the Internet (while of course the
Internet existed before the 90's, the world wide web was developped only
in 1989 (on the NeXTcube), really took off only from 1991-1992, and you
had to wait still a few years for IP connectivity being widely
accessible, to justify saving the sources of an application to some
repository. But then from 1986 and eventually 1994, the ANSI Common
Lisp standard happened, and I would guess than most non-dead lisp
applications were ported to Common Lisp and therefore to CLOS. For
example, maxima contains some compatibility module defining flavors
macros in terms of CLOS, and runs now on Common Lisp.

In the CMU AI Lab repository, the news archives of that period contain
quite a number of references to flavors, perhaps reading them you'd find
references to bodies of source using it? There seems to be also some
tarballs in this repository containing "flavors", so you might be lucky
there.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repo...

http://www.softwarepreservation.org/search?SearchableTe...

Otherwise, flavors was used on the LispMachine, so if you find some
sources of LispMachine software, you'll get it.

--
__Pascal Bourguignon__

Robert Swindells

7/25/2015 10:10:00 AM

On Fri, 24 Jul 2015 17:31:05 -0700, Robert Virding wrote:

> I am interested in first understanding Flavors then implementing a
> version of it in LFE (http...). While I have found the Lisp
> Machine manual on-line I have not been able to find any good examples of
> using Flavors. Any pointers to good example usage would be greatly
> appreciated.

For an implementation, you could start by looking in the final release
of Franz Lisp:

<http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/lisp-opus38....

The files flavors.l and flavorm.l contain a fairly portable version of it.

There are several examples of using Flavors in the MIT Lisp Machine
sources, in particular the window system and debugger.

> To experiment with Flavors I have tried to run a Lisp Machine emulator,
> the CADR referenced in http://www.unl.... While with a bit of
> fiddling I can get it to compile on my Mac, with OS X 10.9.2, it crashes
> with an "Abort trap 6". I have managed to get it to run on an older Mac.
> Any help with this or pointers to alternatives would also be greatly
> appreciated.

We moved development of the CADR emulator to common-lisp.net, the current
version should build and work on the Mac.

I need to improve the web pages but you can browse the Subversion source
tree at:

<https://trac.common-lisp.net/mit-cadr/b...

Robert Swindells

rvirding

7/25/2015 4:43:00 PM

True, lisp-2 has its problems, but the reason for choosing it for LFE was that I felt it fitted better on the erlang VM which can't do CL or scheme in a native and efficient way.

Robert

carlitos

7/26/2015 10:27:00 PM

You might find something useful in "LISP Lore: A Guide to Programming the LISP Machine" (the book has a full chapter devoted to Flavors).

1st edition:
http://archive.org/details/lisploreguid...

2nd edition:
http://textfiles.meulie.net/bitsaved/Books/Bromley_LispLor...

Cheers,

Carlos

Jeff Barnett

7/27/2015 4:24:00 AM

Robert Virding wrote on 7/24/2015 6:31 PM:
> I am interested in first understanding Flavors then implementing a version of it in LFE (http...). While I have found the Lisp Machine manual on-line I have not been able to find any good examples of using Flavors. Any pointers to good example usage would be greatly appreciated.
>
> To experiment with Flavors I have tried to run a Lisp Machine emulator, the CADR referenced in http://www.unl.... While with a bit of fiddling I can get it to compile on my Mac, with OS X 10.9.2, it crashes with an "Abort trap 6". I have managed to get it to run on an older Mac. Any help with this or pointers to alternatives would also be greatly appreciated.
>
> Robert
>
Disks (CD) of the Symbolics machine's source code were possessed by all
owners and renters of those machines. If you can locate someone who
would let you copy their disk, you would have a great deal of the
implementation albeit in Lisp already.
--
Jeff Barnett

n2kra

7/27/2015 8:26:00 AM

Another LMI machine, the TI explorer

https://archive.org/details/t...

Has several flavor files in the sources.
If that emulator is easier to get running,
But the source is not in a disk image

rvirding

7/27/2015 3:08:00 PM

On Saturday, July 25, 2015 at 12:12:04 PM UTC+2, Robert Swindells wrote:
>
> For an implementation, you could start by looking in the final release
> of Franz Lisp:
>
> <http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/lisp-opus38....
>
> The files flavors.l and flavorm.l contain a fairly portable version of it.

Now I just have to understand the file format. :-)

> We moved development of the CADR emulator to common-lisp.net, the current
> version should build and work on the Mac.
>
> I need to improve the web pages but you can browse the Subversion source
> tree at:
>
> <https://trac.common-lisp.net/mit-cadr/b...

Thank you I will try it.

Robert

rvirding

7/27/2015 3:09:00 PM

On Monday, July 27, 2015 at 12:27:26 AM UTC+2, carlos...@gmail.com wrote:
> You might find something useful in "LISP Lore: A Guide to Programming the LISP Machine" (the book has a full chapter devoted to Flavors).
>
> 1st edition:
> http://archive.org/details/lisploreguid...
>
> 2nd edition:
> http://textfiles.meulie.net/bitsaved/Books/Bromley_LispLor...
>
> Cheers,
>
> Carlos

Yes, this like a good book. Thanks

Robert

rvirding

7/27/2015 3:10:00 PM

On Monday, July 27, 2015 at 10:26:14 AM UTC+2, n2kr...@gmail.com wrote:
> Another LMI machine, the TI explorer
>
> https://archive.org/details/t...
>
> Has several flavor files in the sources.
> If that emulator is easier to get running,
> But the source is not in a disk image

That one I had forgotten. Do you know of any working emulators for it?

Robert

comp.lang.lisp

Lisp Machine Flavors

rvirding

William James

Pascal J. Bourguignon

Robert Swindells

rvirding

carlitos

Jeff Barnett

n2kra

rvirding

rvirding

rvirding

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