Here is a very simple Common Lisp compiler [1] of Nock,  C. Yarvin’s elegant systems language. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; *************************** define reader macros *************************** (eval-when (:load-toplevel :execute) (defmacro char-macro (ch &body body) `(set-macro-character ,ch #'(lambda (stream char) (declare (ignore char)) ,@body))) ; define syntax of N-expression (char-macro #\[ (reduce #'(lambda (&rest exp) (if (functionp (car exp)) […]

Dear Readers, Not long ago, some of you submitted my writings to Hacker News.  I recommend against doing this, if you value your reputation there. The editors of Hacker News appear to have taken an active dislike to this site.  I don’t care to hazard a guess as to why.  They have begun deleting any […]

The Nook, Barnes & Noble’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle, was greeted with fanfare for including a feature which allows users to “lend” a purchased book to anyone, with a guarantee of recovering it later. The first announcement I came across mentioned no other rules governing the lending process. My first thought was that such an […]

Let’s take another look at the console. There are several boards inside, but this is the only one which deals in custom Symbolics protocols (as opposed to the widely-known intricacies of operating a black-and-white CRT.) The rough annotations are my own. Click on the pictures for super-size (~10MB!) images. Once again, the Phase Encoded Video […]

The machine does indeed power up and run: But this is not enough. The console is a museum piece. While a Lisp Machine circa 1986 might last for a reasonably long time between repairs, a CRT of the same vintage likely will not. Moreover, it is a pain to have around, even if it were […]

Historical note (Jan. 7, 2014) – This ancient post still gets several hundred to a thousand page views per month! And, unsurprisingly, the Clojure community still replies to the criticisms therein with… only insults. This is what comes of a product fundamentally brain-damaged at birth. I find Clojure revolting. It is the most explicit to […]

This light-hearted song/video mostly summarizes my opinions on existing systems. The lyrics, for those (like myself) with only sporadic access to the Flash player.

From Richard Feynman’s The Character of Physical Law: “It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region […]

The temptation to implement a modernized Lisp architecture in a high-end FPGA never ceases to tug at me. It has recently re-asserted itself after my discovery that one can buy reasonably priced and fully assembled boards containing the latter, complete with SDRAM, DVI, SATA, etc. sockets. Verilog guides have silently crept into my browser tabs […]