Re: member returns list

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>
> writes:
>
>>> Why don't you do a Lisp OS with Lisp-only software?
>>
>> Time. Money.
>
> OK, what I meant was actually again why Lisp is so
> marginalized. Not only in "industry" (yuk, that is
> a stupid word) but also in the systems we use every
> day. Every program I ever use is written in C (except
> for Emacs which is C and Lisp). 

It's up to you to choose programs written in lisp instead.

For example, instead of GNU emacs you could use Hemlock (notably in
Clozure CL.app on MacOSX, it's nicely integrated).  Of course, it
doesn't benefit of all the GNU emacs third-party packages, but you have
an emacs with the same basic editing features, all written in Common
Lisp from the bottom up (well, apart from a small kernel in ccl written
in C, and from UI stuff in Hemlock written in CL but calling out to
the Objective-C cocoa framework).


> Do you think the association between C and Unix, strong as it may, is
> enough to explain this? 

Historically, definitively.

But for a long time now, availability of implementations and computing
power and memory size of unix machines has not justified the use of C
(or C++) at all for applications.  And people also realize that when
they created the P languages, perl, php, python and rupy^W ruby.

I would use C only to write a device driver.

> The only big program which I use that I can think of which is
> Lisp-only is Gnus which is a part of Emacs.

> But: Keeping the Linux kernel (which is in C) and then
> starting to replace the typical components in a Unix
> or Linux system (which are all in C) with ditto in
> Lisp, I don't see the purpose of that. 

This is however the approach taken by Android, and they obtain a system
that is quite different from a unix system.  The only thing unix in
Android, is the use of the linux kernel for the drivers, and for the
implementation of sandboxes.

Android "user accounts" whatever that means, are not unix account (unix
account on Android actually correspond more to Android applications,
than to human users).


> What would be interesting is a system that is Lispic, not just another
> Unix only written in Lisp, which would be stupid at best.

I already mentionned Mezzano.  If you want to write your own, you can
use Movitz CL, or of course, build on Mezzano.

> Do you have hyperlinks to a bootable DVD or USB?

No, it's no batteries included.  You get the sources from the github and
do it yourself.

https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
https://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/
https://github.com/PuercoPop/Movitz

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a
dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to
keep the man from touching the equipment.” -- Carl Bass CEO Autodesk