On 12/8/05, Jeff Kinz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Humor, nothing more. (And what's funnier than emacs? )
vi! (Sorry, couldn't resist. ;-) ) >> It's not a "scripting" language, it's a full-fledged programming > > Ahem. It was a joke! It's a rather silly argument in any event, since the set of programming languages includes the set of scripting languages. I suspect Paul was really thinking of the age-old "compiled vs interpreted" distinction. Of course, said distinction has become rather confused in modern times, anyway. Consider that modern CPUs almost always do run-time interpretation to "micro ops", and one could argue that *everything* is "interpreted" these days. Perl gets "compiled" into an intermediate form, and that then gets interpreted. You can also dump said intermediate to a file to skip that step. Then there's Java, which "compiles" into machine code, but usually for a machine that originally didn't even exist (although I understand some have been built!). What makes the Java VM different from a hardware emulator like Bochs? Does the existence of Bochs make all i386 programs interpreted? And that brings us back to micro-ops again. It isn't 1985 anymore. The old school of dividing everything into either "source is compiled into native machine code" vs "source is interpreted at run-time" doesn't really apply. And it wasn't very interesting even back then. :) > I felt no need to start lecturing people about first year Computer > Science nomenclature. Don't worry, on the Internet, *somebody* always feels like lecturing on nomenclature! ;-) > Some things don't need to be examined in detail. That's crazy talk! ;-) > What was the machine that the lisp programming model was based on? > (NO GOOGLE FOR THIS ONE, YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS.) It was a fairly early IBM with a 3- or 4- digit model number, IIRC. I think there was a "4" in it. (I ain't a LISP guy.) I do remember that CAR = Contents of Address Register and CDR = Contents of Decrement Register. The fundamental concept was to make everything a linked list (hence the name). The fundamental data structure was a pair. The first element of every pair (CAR) was a data value. The second element (CDR) was a pointer to the next element, if any. Everything (including LISP programs themselves) built from that. That's about all I know about LISP (other (then (the (parenthesis)))). > First correct answer posted gets a valuable virtual no-prize. Useful for Java programmers. ;) -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss