Re: Books, books, and then... some books

From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH) Maintained by R. Paul McCarty

--- DLP <> wrote:
[Replying to this message since I can't seem to find
the grand-parent]
> > At 03:40 PM 6/23/05, DLP wrote:
> > 
> > >At first and probably for a long while various
> > >implementations and
> > >dialects inspired of Common Lisp will hold my
> attention,
> > >but in a year
> > >or two perhaps I may feel brave enough to let go
> long
> > >enough to take
> > >up another language. :-)
> > >My fascination with Common Lisp comes from the
> fact that it's
> > >implementations are often if not always
> programmable
> > >programming
> > >languages(as the motto goes).
> > >
> > >Prolog is also interesting, and I understand a
> great deal
> > >of work has
> > >been done using Prolog so being able to
> understand it well
> > >would
> > >definately help me to read any works which I can
> learn
> > >something from.
> > >
> > >Though, all that said, I will probably stick
> mostly to
> > >something like
> > >GNU Common Lisp. Im definately open however to
> any
> > >suggestions :-D
As a CLer, I have several suggestions:
1. start reading comp.lang.lisp and hanging around in
# if you're not already.

2. If you're looking for a good intro to CL,
"Practical Common Lisp" by Peter Seibel is very good
(Dead Tree or at http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/). It
doesn't teach programming in a general sense (for
that, I'd go with, for example, David S Touretzky's
"Common Lisp: Gentle Introduction to Symbolic
Computation", which is out of print, but still
available at his webpage
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/).

3. GCL isn't quite as mature as either SBCL
(http://www.sbcl.org) or CMUCL
(http://cmucl.cons.org), which are both FOSS too. The
only advantage I can see for going with GCL is that it
runs with mingw on windows and that it can generate
smaller cores for distribution. That's probably not
relevant for a wearable (we're looking at ~20 MB for a
core at most, anyway).

4. There already are Prolog engines in Lisp. Peter
Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence
Programming demonstrates a small prototype, AllegroCL
(commercial vendor) comes with their own
implementation, and there is currently a small group
of people (~1-3, I'm not sure) working on parsing
Prolog syntax itself in addition to working on an
engine (the other engines only grok a lispy, READable
Prolog syntax).

5. RETE is a rule-based reasoning algorithm has been
implemented in CL (http://lisa.sourceforge.net/ for
example). Again this is relatively mature (given that
earlier industry-standard implementations were also
often based on CL ;).

Well, anyway, good luck with your project, whatever it
may be! (I still can't find the parent or the
grand-parent) I hope you will these pointers useful.

Ob-hardware-comment: What do you think of Motion
Computing's LS800
http://www.motioncomputing.com/products/tablet_pc_ls.asp.
A small, full-blown slate tablet pc (8.94” by 6.69” by
0.87”, 2.2 pounds), with 802.11a/b/g and BT for 1.9k
USD is nothing to scoff at :). Just a Zaurus + the
equipment to give it VGA-out, BT and/or 802.11 and
maybe USB [1.1, and not 2] (depending on the model) is
already in ~1k. Of course, the computational power and
storage capabilities aren,t comparable, and nor is the
battery life... This doesn't seem like such a bad
option, especially once it'll have dropped in price in
a couple months.

Paul Khuong

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 

_______________________________________________
Wear-Hard mailing list

http://www.haven.org/mailman/listinfo/wear-hard