Notices by Lars Brinkhoff (larsbrinkhoff@mastodon.sdf.org)

@amszmidt I made an emulator that realistically exhibits the unusability of a VT100.

@amszmidt @crc See, you're already wrong! That was easy.

@amszmidt @crc As for Forth, two stacks, dictionary (another stack if you will), a handful of primitives, syntax made of tokens separated by whitespace.

@amszmidt @crc I think there are some serious and interesting points to be made. What is Lisp? What is Forth?

For the former, probably something about cons cells, atoms, functions, and S-expressions. I'd like this to include Scheme but exclude Dylan. But there's an angle where Scheme is kind of like the Esperanto of Lisp; it wants to make a clean break, so in this sense it's not part of the continuous Lisp lineage.

@amszmidt Did I troll it right?

@amszmidt First you make your argument. I'm willing to humor your unsound reasoning. Then I can tell you why you're wrong.

@weekend_editor @amszmidt Is it still an ob"array" on the Lispm? Or just the Maclisp name sticking around? Asking for a fiend.

@0xba @Lee_Holmes This is the way. But honestly, can we expect people to remember that every time?

I work with weird file names like -READ- -THIS- so I have learned to use -- in my scripts. Even so, I sometimes forget.

@amszmidt Ha ha, only serious.

@amszmidt Quicklisp next?

@amszmidt @ksaj @loke I was also thinking of how "grandchild" is "barnbarn", and "grandson" is "sonson" or "dotterson", so in this case Swedish has both the specific and unspecific words. But I feel the preference would usually be "barnbarn".

By the way, also fun to note that in Northern England and Scotland they have the word "bairn" for child/barn. Old Norse influence?

@whitequark Did you know Emacs has two separate bytecode compilers and interpreters? One is a stack machine, the other is a register machine.

The escape code was also called Altmode. On Emacs, which was invented 1976 at the MIT AI lab, an Altmode prefix key can be used the same way as a Meta modifier key. This is till true today.

This 1961 proposed standard for punched tape has a lozenge ◊ as the printed representation for an ESCAPE code. Around 10 years later, the Stanford and MIT AI labs adopted this glyph for their extended ASCII character set.

In the early 1980s, the Sun workstation adopted the Meta modifier; the keyboard used a lozenge or filled diamond ◆ symbol.

A few years later, both Altmode and Meta where adopted by the Lisp machine "space-cadet" keyboard.

Appendix A: Yes, earlier Sun keyboards labelled Meta "Left" and "Right.

NOW, this all leads up to my question: Riddle me this, is there a connection between the SAIL/MIT Altmode ◊, and the Sun Meta ◊◆?

Appendix B: Interesting information about the Meta modifier in X and xterm. https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm-meta-key.html

@xuxxux @amszmidt @pymander @jbaty My .emacs vibe is more like "if the defaults are good enough for rms, they are good enough for me". 75 lines total; no use-package.