Most recent standard of Common Lisp - common-lisp

Could anyone tell me what the most recent document standardizing Common Lisp is, please (one that shoud be followed by the various implementations)? I ask because many books about CL that I can find online come from the '90s, so I'm wondering whether they are up-to-date. I also come from a Scheme background where standardization is done in the RnRS series. For CL I am only aware of the ANSI X3.226:1994 standard (X3J13); is this it?
EDIT
Thank you for the answer, before closing the question let me slightly extend it: is the situation in CL the same as the one in Scheme, i.e. the various implementations implementing mutually incompatible extensions of the standard, to the result that there is no single "CL language", or is this community more uniform?

Common Lisp
Common Lisp has had four language phases:
1984: CLtL, Common Lisp defined by the book Common Lisp, the Language
1990 CLtL2, Common Lisp described by the book Common Lisp, the Language, 2nd Edition. It described an interim state before the ANSI CL standard and is not fully compatible. The book is available in HTML format, see Common Lisp, the Language, 2nd Edition
1994, ANSI Common Lisp standard, see the CL HyperSpec. A useful free PDF has been made from the last draft, see Common Lisp Standard Draft.
since then: stable core, various extensions, attempts on community standards (CDR)
Most current implementations provide the full ANSI CL standard with various extensions. Implementations which don't provide the full standard: mocl (by design) and GCL. For many extensions there are portable abstraction layers or portable library (threading, FFI, CLOS streams, ...).
In Common Lisp once can find out which language dialect an implementation provides, but only ANSI CL really matters today:
CL-USER 11 > (let ((dialects '()))
(dolist (d '(:ansi-cl :cltl2 :cltl1))
(when (member d *features*) (push d dialects)))
dialects)
(:ANSI-CL)
Scheme
Thus the Common Lisp situation is a bit different from Scheme: almost all Common Lisp implementations are providing a large common (!) language. For Scheme there are at least R5RS, R6RS and R7RS variants in use. But Scheme also has a lot of extensions and with a good community language extension management (see SRFI). There is some work on a R7RS large standard variant, which would standardize a large language: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/scheme-reports-wg2

Yes. It has not changed.
You can find it in hypertext form under the name "Common Lisp Hyperspec" (CLHS) online.
EDIT: Yes, there are different extensions that the implementations do independently of each other. However, for the most important ones, there are portability wrapper libraries that use read time conditionals to load the right code in the different environments. Examples: bordeaux-threads (threads), osicat (system calls).

Related

Where does the word "flatMap" originate from?

Nowdays flatMap is the most widely used name for correspondent operation on monad-like objects.
But I can't find where it has appeared for the first time and what has popularized it.
The oldest appearance I know about is in Scala.
In Haskell it is called bind.
In category theory Greek notation is used.
Partial answer, which hopefully provides some useful "seed nodes" to start more thorough search. My best guess:
1958 for map used for list processing,
1988 for flatten used in context of monads,
2004 for flatMap used as important method backing for-comprehensions in Scala.
The function / method name flatMap seems to be a portmanteau word composed from flatten and map. This makes sense, because whenever M is some monad, A,B some types, and a: M[A], f: A => M[B] a value and a function, then the implementations of map, flatMap and flatten should satisfy
a.flatMap(f) = a.map(f).flatten
(in Scala-syntax).
Let's first consider the both components map and flatten separately.
Map
The map-function seems to have been used to map over lists since time immemorial. My best guess would be that it came from Lisp (around 1958), and then spread to all other languages that had anything resembling higher-order functions.
Flatten
Given how many things are represented by lists in Lisp, I assume that flatten has also been used there for list processing.
The usage of flatten in context of monads must be much more recent, because the monads themselves have been introduced in programming quite a bit later. If we are looking for the usage of word "flatten" in the context of monadic computations, we probably should at least check the papers by Eugenio Moggi. Indeed, in "Computational Lambda-Calculus and Monads" from 1988, he uses the formulation:
Remark 2.2: Intuitively eta_A: A -> TA gives the inclusion of values into computations, while mu_A: T^2 A -> TA flatten a computation of a computation into a computation.
(typesetting changed by me, emphasis mine, text in italic as in original). I think it's interesting that Moggi talks about flattening computations, and not just lists.
Math notation / "Greek"
On the Greek used in mathematical notation: in category theory, the more common way to introduce monads is through the natural transformations that correspond to pure and flatten, the morphisms corresponding to flatMap are deemphasized. However, nobody calls it "flatten". For example, Maclane calls the natural transformation corresponding to method pure "unit" (not to be confused with method unit), and flatten is usually called "multiplication", in analogy with Monoids. One might investigate further whether it was different when the "triple"-terminology was more prevalent.
flatMap
To find the origins of the flatMap portmanteau word, I'd propose to start with the most prominent popularizer today, and then try to backtrack from there. Apparently, flatMap is a Scala meme, so it seems reasonable to start from Scala. One might check the standard libraries (especially the List data structure) of the usual suspects: the languages that influenced Scala. These "roots" are named in Chapter 1, section 1.4 in Odersky's "Programming in Scala":
C, C++ and C# are probably not where it came from.
In Java it was the other way around: the flatMap came from Scala into version 1.8 of Java.
I can't say anything about Smalltalk
Ruby definitely has flat_map on Enumerable, but I don't know anything about Ruby, and I don't want to dig into the source code to find out when it was introduced.
Algol and Simula: definitely not.
Strangely enough ML (SML) seems to get by without flatMap, it only has concat (which is essentially the same as flatten). OCaml's lists also seem to have flatten, but no flatMap.
As you've already mentioned, Haskell had all this long ago, but in Haskell it is called bind and written as an operator
Erlang has flatmap on lists, but I'm not sure whether this is the origin, or whether it was introduced later. The problem with Erlang is that it is from 1986, back then there was no github.
I can't say anything about Iswim, Beta and gbeta.
I think it would be fair to say that flatMap has been popularized by Scala, for two reasons:
The flatMap took a prominent role in the design of Scala's collection library, and few years later it turned out to generalize nicely to huge distributed collections (Apache Spark and similar tools)
The flatMap became the favorite toy of everyone who decided to do functional programming on the JVM properly (Scalaz and libraries inspired by Scalaz, like Scala Cats)
To sum it up: the "flatten" terminology has been used in the context of monads since the very beginning. Later, it was combined with map into flatMap, and popularized by Scala, or more specifically by frameworks such as Apache Spark and Scalaz.
flatmap was introduced in Section 2.2.3 Sequences as Conventional Interfaces in "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" as
(define (flatmap proc seq)
(accumulate append nil (map proc seq)))
The first edition of the book appeared in 1985.

Replacing an ordinary function with a generic function

I'd like to use names such as elt, nth and mapcar with a new data structure that I am prototyping, but these names designate ordinary functions and so, I think, would need to be redefined as generic functions.
Presumably it's bad form to redefine these names?
Is there a way to tell defgeneric not to generate a program error and to go ahead and replace the function binding?
Is there a good reason for these not being generic functions or is just historic?
What's the considered wisdom and best practice here please?
If you are using SBCL or ABCL, and aren't concerned with ANSI compliance, you could investigate Extensible Sequences:
http://www.sbcl.org/manual/#Extensible-Sequences
http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01cr/papers/ilc2007/sequences-20070301.pdf
...you can't redefine functions in the COMMON-LISP package, but you could create a new package and shadow the imports of the functions you want to redefine.
Is there a good reason for these not being generic functions or is just historic?
Common Lisp has some layers of language in some of its areas. Higher-level parts of the software might need to be built on lower-level constructs.
One of its goals was being fast enough for a range of applications.
Common Lisp also introduced the idea of sequences, the abstraction over lists and vectors, at a time, when the language didn't have an object-system. CLOS came several years after the initial Common Lisp design.
Take for example something like equality - for numbers.
Lisp has =:
(= a b)
That's the fastest way to compare numbers. = is also defined only for numbers.
Then there are eql, equal and equalp. Those work for numbers, but also for some other data types.
Now, if you need more speed, you can declare the types and tell the compiler to generate faster code:
(locally
(declare (fixnum a b)
(optimize (speed 3) (safety 0)))
(= a b))
So, why is = not a CLOS generic function?
a) it was introduced when CLOS did not exist
but equally important:
b) in Common Lisp it wasn't known (and it still isn't) how to make a CLOS generic function = as fast as a non-generic function for typical usage scenarios - while preserving dynamic typing and extensibility
CLOS generic function simply have a speed penalty. The runtime dispatch costs.
CLOS is best used for higher level code, which then really benefits from features like extensibility, multi-dispatch, inheritance/combinations. Generic functions should be used for defined generic behavior - not as collections of similar methods.
With better implementation technology, implementation-specific language enhancements, etc. it might be possible to increase the range of code which can be written in a performant way using CLOS. This has been tried with programming languages like Dylan and Julia.
Presumably it's bad form to redefine these names?
Common Lisp implementations don't let you replace them just so. Be aware, that your replacement functions should be implemented in a way which works consistently with the old functions. Also, old versions could be inlined in some way and not be replaceable everywhere.
Is there a way to tell defgeneric not to generate a program error and to go ahead and replace the function binding?
You would need to make sure that the replacement is working while replacing it. The code replacing functions, might use those function you are replacing.
Still, implementations allow you to replace CL functions - but this is implementation specific. For example LispWorks provides the variables lispworks:*packages-for-warn-on-redefinition* and lispworks:*handle-warn-on-redefinition*. One can bind them or change them globally.
What's the considered wisdom and best practice here please?
There are two approaches:
use implementation specific ways to replace standard Common Lisp functions
This can be dangerous. Plus you need to support it for all implementations of CL you want to use...
use a language package, where you define your new language. Here this would be standard Common Lisp plus your extensions/changes. Export everything the user would use. In your software use this package instead of CL.

Higher-order functions in VHDL or Verilog

I've been programming in more functional-style languages and have gotten to appreciate things like tuples, and higher-order functions such as maps, and folds/aggregates. Do either VHDL or Verilog have any of these kinds of constructs?
For example, is there any way to do even simple things like
divByThreeCount = count (\x -> x `mod` 3 == 0) myArray
or
myArray2 = map (\x -> x `mod` 3) myArray
or even better yet let me define my own higher-level constructs recursively, in either of these languages?
I think you're right that there is a clash between the imperative style of HDLs and the more functional aspects of combinatorial circuits. Describing parallel circuits with languages which are linear in nature is odd, but I think a full blown functional HDL would be a disaster.
The thing with functional languages (I find) is that it's very easy to write code which takes huge resources, either in time, memory, or processing power. That's their power; they can express complexity quite succinctly, but they do so at the expense of resource management. Put that in an HDL and I think you'll have a lot of large, power hungry designs when synthesised.
Take your map example:
myArray2 = map (\x -> x `mod` 3) myArray
How would you like that to synthesize? To me you've described a modulo operator per element of the array. Ignoring the fact that modulo isn't cheap, was that what you intended, and how would you change it if it wasn't? If I start breaking that function up in some way so that I can say "instantiate a single operator and use it multiple times" I lost a lot of the power of functional languages.
...and then we've got retained state. Retained state is everywhere in hardware. You need it. You certainly wouldn't use a purely functional language.
That said, don't throw away your functional design patterns. Combinatorial processes (VHDL) and "always blocks" (Verilog) can be viewed as functions that apply themselves to the data presented at their input. Pipelines can be viewed as chains of functions. Often the way you structure a design looks functional, and can share a lot with the "Actor" design pattern that's popular in Erlang.
So is there stuff to learn from functional programming? Certainly. Do I wish VHDL and Verilog took more from functional languages? Sometimes. The trouble is functional languages get too high level too quickly. If I can't distinguish between "use one instance of f() many times" and "use many instances of f()" then it doesn't do what a Hardware Description Language must do... describe hardware.
Have a look at http://clash-lang.org for an example of a higher-order language that is transpiled into VHDL/Verilog. It allows functions to be passed as arguments, currying etc., even a limited set of recursive data structures (Vec). As you would expect the pure moore function instantiates a stateful Moore machine given step/output functions and a start state. It has this signature:
moore :: (s -> i -> s) -> (s -> o) -> s -> Signal i -> Signal o
Signals model the time-evolved values in sequential logic.
BlueSpec is used by a small com. known by few people only - INTEL
It’s an extension of SystemVerilog (SV) and called BSV
But it’s NOT open - I don’t think you can try use or even learn it without paying BlueSpec.com BIG money
There’s also Lava that’s used by Xilinx but I don’t know if you can use it directly.
Note:
In Vhdl functions (and maybe Verilog too)
CAN’T have time delay (you can’t ask function to wait for clk event)
Vhdl has a std. lib. for complex num. cal.
But in Vhdl you can change or overload a system function like add (“+”) and define your implementation.
You can declare vector or matrix add sub mul or div (+ - * /) function,
use generic size (any) and recursive declarations - most synthesizers will "understand you" and do what you’ve asked.

Why would Common Lisp (SBCL) use so much memory for a simple program?

since I'm a newbie to Common Lisp I tried to solve problems on SPOJ by using Common Lisp (SBCL). The first problem is a simple task of reading numbers until number 42 is found. Here's my solution:
(defun study-num ()
(let ((num (parse-integer (read-line t))))
(when (not (= num 42))
(format t "~A~%" num)
(study-num))))
(study-num)
The solution is accepted. But when I looked into the details of the result I found it used 57M of MEM! It's bloody unreasonable but I can't figure out why. What can I do to make an optimization?
You are making repeated recursive calls, without enough optimization switched on to enable tail-call elimination (SBCL does do this, but only when you have "optimize for speed" set high and "optimize for debug info" set low).
The Common Lisp standard leaves tail-call elimination as an implementation quality issue and provides other looping constructs (like LOOP or DO, both possibly suitable for this application).
In addition, a freshly started SBCL is probably going to be larger than you expect, due to needing to pull in its runtime environment and base image.
I think yo are not realizing that Common Lisp is an online language environment with full library and compiler loaded into RAM just to give you the first prompt. After that, load in your program is probably a hardly even noticeable increase in size. Lisp does not compile and link an independent executable file made of only your code and whatever lib routines reachable from your code. That's what C and similar languages do. Instead, Lisp adds your code into its already sizeable online environment. As a new user it seams horrible. But if you have a modern general purpose computer with 100's MB of RAM, it quickly becomes something you can forget about as you enjoy the benefits of the online environment. Thins is also called a "dynamic language environment."
Various Lisp implementations have different ways to create programs. One is to dump an image of the memory of a Lisp system and to write that to disk. On restart this image is loaded with a runtime and then started again. This is quite common.
This is also what SBCL does when it saves an executable. Thus this executable includes the full SBCL.
Some other implementations are creating smaller executables using images (CLISP), some can remove unused code from executables (Allegro CL, LispWorks) and others are creating very small programs via compilation to C (mocl).
SBCL has only one easy way to reduce the size of an executable: one can compress the image.

What is the most minimal functional programming language?

What is the most minimal functional programming language?
It depends on what you mean by minimal.
To start with, the ancestor of functional languages is, first and foremost, mathematical logic. The computational use of certain logics came after the fact. In a sense, many mathematical systems (the cores of which are usually quite minimal) could be called functional languages. But I doubt that's what you're after!
Best known is Alonzo Church's lambda calculus, of which there are variants and descendants:
The simplest form is what's called the untyped lambda calculus; this contains nothing but lambda abstractions, with no restrictions on their use. The creation of data structures using only anonymous functions is done with what's called Church encoding and represents data by fundamental operations on it; the number 5 becomes "repeat something 5 times", and so on.
Lisp-family languages are little more than untyped lambda calculus, augmented with atomic values, cons cells, and a handful of other things. I'd suspect Scheme is the most minimalist here, as if memory serves me it was created first as a teaching language.
The original purpose of the lambda calculus, that of describing logical proofs, failed when the untyped form was shown to be inconsistent, which is a polite term for "lets you prove that false is true". (Historical trivia: the paper proving this, which was a significant thing at the time, did so by writing a logical proof that, in computational terms, went into an infinite loop.) Anyway, the use as a logic was recovered by introducing typed lambda calculus. These tend not to be directly useful as programming languages, however, particularly since being logically sound makes the language not Turing-complete.
However, similarly to how Lisps derive from untyped lambda calculus, a typed lambda calculus extended with built-in recursion, algebraic data types, and a few other things gets you the extended ML-family of languages. These tend to be pretty minimal
at heart, with syntactic constructs having straightforward translations to lambda terms in many cases. Besides the obvious ML dialects, this also includes Haskell and a few other languages. I'm not aware of any especially minimalist typed functional languages, however; such a language would likely suffer from poor usability far worse than a minimalist untyped language.
So as far as lambda calculus variants go, the pure untyped lambda calculus with no extra features is Turing-complete and about as minimal as you can get!
However, arguably more minimal is to eliminate the concept of "variables" entirely--in fact, this was originally done to simplify meta-mathematical proofs about logical systems, if memory serves me--and use only higher-order functions called combinators. Here we have:
Combinatory logic itself, as originally invented by Moses Schönfinkel and developed extensively by Haskell Curry. Each combinator is defined by a simple substitution rule, for instance Sxyz = xz(yz). The lowercase letters are used like variables in this definition, but keep in mind that combinatory logic itself doesn't use variables, or assign names to anything at all. Combinatory logic is minimal, to be sure, but not too friendly as a programming language. Best-known is the SK combinator base. S is defined as in the example above; K is Kxy = x. Those two combinators alone suffice to make it Turing-complete! This is almost frighteningly minimal.
Unlambda is a language based on SK combinators, extending it with a few extra combinators with special properties. Less minimal, but lets you write "Hello World".
Even two combinators is more than you need, though. Various one-combinator bases exist; perhaps the best known is the iota Combinator, defined as ιx = xSK, which is used in a minimalist language also called Iota
Also of some note is Lazy K, which is distinguished from Unlambda by not introducing additional combinators, having no side effects, and using lazy evaluation. Basically, it's the Haskell of the combinator-based-esoteric-language world. It supports both the SK base, as well as the iota combinator.
Which of those strikes you as most "minimal" is probably a matter of taste.
The arguably most minimal functional languages are iota and Jot, because they use only one combinator (while unlambda needs two). Here is a short explanation: http://web.archive.org/web/20061105204247/http://ling.ucsd.edu/~barker/Iota/
I'd imagine the most minimal functional "programming language" would be lambda calculus.
BrainF*ck is a simple, easy to use programming language. Here's a quick rundown.
Imagine you have a near-infinite range of boxes, each empty. Luckily, you are not alone! You can move back and forth along the line, put things in them, and take them out. Though quite basic, with enough time you can do about anything: http://www.iwriteiam.nl/Ha_bf_inter.html. Here are the commands.
+ | add one to currrent box
- | take one from current box
> | move one box to the right
< | move one box to the left
[] | loop
. | print current value
, | input current value
other stuff to look at:
P" | simplified BF
language f | newer simplified BF
http://www2.gvsu.edu/miljours/bf.html | cool BF stuff/intro
https://www.esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list | list of similar langs/variants
An esoteric programming language (a.k.a. esolang) is a programming language designed to test the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, as software art, as a hacking interface to another language (particularly functional programming or procedural programminglanguages), or as a joke. The use of esotericdistinguishes these languages from programming languages that working developers use to write software. Usually, an esolang's creators do not intend the language to be used for mainstream programming, although some esoteric features, such as visuospatial syntax, have inspired practical applications in the arts. Such languages are often popular among hackers and hobbyists.

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