LispForum

As far as people's expectations go, most users seem to prefer familiarity. So the UI people will prefer 40 years from now is likely to be a variation of today's windowing UI, derived from the Xerox PARC windowing UI of 40 years ago. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" at work. The real OS in...

Thank you for your reply, David. My issue with surveillance software is that there is only money in it as long as it doesn't give a clue. Imagine if one actually did. And it would print something like: "You now hold 3000+ data points on every human, you are fighting ~12 wars, and losing all 12 ...

...one starts to have a clue how to program an OS? OK, so I am a n00b. I went through the 600 page "gentle introduction" book, finished the vending machine simulator. So I could code a vending app now, but I don't really need one, Ebay is already invented. So I asked myself, "what I'd...

Thank you for the masterful reply, Goheeca
A week later, I'm still studying some of your solution's elements to grok how it works

Programming n00b, I was solving the book question, "Write a function FIRSTZERO that takes 3 numbers as input and returns a word (one of "first," "second," or "none") indicating where the first zero appears." So I wrote (defun firstzero (x y z) (if (= x 0) 'fir...

nuntius wrote:In a dynamic language like Lisp, data values are "tagged" with information describing their type.

Got it, like controller values in MIDI. I can see how this is more efficient than calculating each... thank you.

I'm reading Touretzky's book on Common Lisp (gotta start somewhere with coding...), and just arrived to the NUMBERP function. It's pretty clear what it does, what I wonder is, how. (What math calculations it is built of.) Is it an "input value is < infinity" type of deal, am I guessing in ...