Follow the links in table below for abstracts and pointers to audio recordings. We also recorded JonL White's opening remarks, the Programming Contest prize-giving, and the ALU meeting.
Invited speakers | |
| Jans Aasman | Scalable Lisp Applications |
| Richard Jones | Dynamic Memory Management |
| John Mallery | CL-HTTP: An Open-source Cross-platform Environment for Web Application Development and Deployment |
| Ralf Moeller | Building a Commercial OWL Reasoner with Lisp |
| Christian Queinnec | Teaching CS to undergraduates at UPMC |
| Manuel Serrano | HOP: An Environment for Developing Web2.0 Applications |
| Michael Sperber | It's All about Being Right: Lessons from the R6RS Process |
| Herbert Stoyan | Lisp: Themes and History |
Technical Papers | |
| Osamu Akashi | Lisp-based Platform and Applications for the Inter-domain Network Management |
| Andrew Borden | Classification Using Conditional Probabilities and Shannon's Definition of Information |
| Jay Cotton | A Metaobject Protocol for CLforJava |
| Chris Connolly | FREEDIUS: Image and Video Understanding in Lisp |
| Stephan Frank | Constraint Propagation in Common Lisp |
| Clemens Fruhwirth | Liskell: Haskell Semantics with Lisp Syntax |
| Hongguang Fu | Knowledge Base for Elementary Geometry On Ontology |
| Mehmet Gençer | CL-SNA: Social Network Analysis with Lisp |
| Cyrus Harmon | Computational Tools for the Analysis of Spatial Patterns of Gene Expression in Common Lisp |
| Peter Herth | Portable Common Lisp Graphical User Interfaces with LTk |
| Charlotte Herzeel | Modularizing Crosscuts in an E-commerce Application in Lisp using Halo |
| Tasuku Hiraishi | Experience with SC: Transformation-based Implementation of Various Extensions to C |
| Mario Latendresse | Simple and Efficient Compilation of List Comprehension in Common Lisp |
| Antonio Menezes Leitao | The Next 700 Programming Libraries |
| Hannes Mehnert | A Domain-Specific Language for manipulation of binary data in Dylan |
| Alexander Repenning | X-expressions in XMLisp: S-expressions and Extensible Markup Language Unite |
| Christophe Rhodes | Extensible Sequences in Common Lisp |
| Martin Simmons | Demonstration: LispWorks & cross-platform graphical application |
| Robert Strandh | ESA: A CLIM Library for Writing EMACS-style Applications |
| Jonathan Wellons | DAUTI - Automated Universal Traffic Inspector |
| Geoff Wozniak | Dynamic ADTs: a "don't ask, don't tell" policy for data abstraction |
Scalable Lisp Applications
Jans Aasman, Franz, Inc. (USA)
audio
The focus of Franz's research and development efforts over the past few years has been storing billions of objects in AllegroCache and billions of RDF triples in AllegroGraph. In the process we had to invent and create a lot of new and interesting technology in Lisp. We implemented new types of B+trees, efficient marshalling, resourcing, new types of hash tables, efficient memory copies, new data type dependent sorts, cluster computing, and better support for memory mapped files. A number of Common Lisp function implementations were improved to be almost completely cons free. In the first part of my presentation I will discuss the scalability issues with AllegroGraph, and give an overview of the new technology and techniques that we had to add to make these products successful. In part two, I will argue that some of this technology should lead the way as part of a new standard for Common Lisp. For those interested, Duane Rettig will be holding a tutorial session that will be complimentary to my presentation detailing in-depth treatment of some of these new techniques.
Jans Aasman started out as an experimental and cognitive psychologist. He earned his Ph.D in cognitive science with a detailed model of car driver behavior using Lisp and Soar. He spent most of his professional life in telecommunications research, specializing in intelligent user interfaces and applied artificial intelligence projects. From 1995 to 2004 he was also a part-time professor in the Industrial Design department of the Technical University of Delft. Jans joined Franz Inc. in 2004, and is currently its Director of Engineering. His current interests are applications of graph databases and social network analysis.
Dynamic Memory Management
Richard Jones, University of Kent (UK)
audio
Garbage collection (GC) is a key component of almost all modern programming languages. The advent of conventional object-oriented languages supported by managed run-times (e.g. Java, C# and even Managed C++) has brought GC into the mainstream and, as memory manager performance is critical for many large applications, brought GC to the attention of programmers outside its traditional functional programming language community. In this talk, I shall start by reviewing how GC got to where it is today, why it is desirable, what performance you might reasonably expect and I shall outline the directions in which GC research is moving. In particular, I'll look at some of the challenges facing modern GC, in contexts ranging from GC for high-performance, multiprocessor systems to GC for real-time systems and limited devices, from better integrating with its operating environment to supporting specific applications. I shall speculate wildly on future directions for research.
Richard Jones is Deputy Director and Senior Lecturer in the department of Computer Science at the University of Kent. He was made a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM in 2006, and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Glasgow in July 2005, the only computer scientist to have received this accolade. He received IBM Faculty Awards in 2003, 2004 and 2005.
CL-HTTP: An Open-source Cross-platform Environment for Web Application Development and Deployment
John Mallery, Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT (USA)
audio
Since it was first implemented in 1994, CL-HTTP has continued to mature as a production Web server and gain new features. This talk will overview the major components, including the server, mark up generation tools, client, caching proxy, Web walker, as well as the bundled tools. It will also describe new capabilities, including SSL (server, client, proxy, Web walker) and generation of HTML 4.0.1 as well as XHTML 1.0. The various Common Lisp ports of CL-HTTP will be reviewed with special attention to the production quality implementations. Some history and future directions will also be discussed. For further details, see: http://www.cl-http.org:8001/
John C. Mallery has been affiliated with the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and its successor, the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, since 1981. With a research focus on computational politics, John Mallery has worked at MIT in the areas of natural language understanding and machine learning since 1980, and more recently, biologically-grounded cognitive architectures and computer security from the levels of hardware up through network infrastructure. As a Research Scientist at the MIT AI Lab during the 1990s, he was the principal architect of the White House Electronic Publications System (1992- 2000), which showcased numerous Internet firsts (inter alia, HTTP 1.1, fragment-aware URNs). Before this, he developed some early systems for online politics in 1992, including systems for multi-protocol hierarchical adaptive surveys (1992, 1994, 1996) and wide-area collaboration (1994 Vice President President's Open Meeting on the National Performance Review).
Building a Commercial OWL Reasoner with Lisp
Ralf Moeller, Hamburg University of Technology (Germany)
audio
This paper describes the functionality of the RacerPro OWL reasoner. Then, in order to demonstrate the power of Lisp technology through available software components, it describes the architecture of RacerPro in terms of its main components, as well as in its use of specific Common Lisp concepts such as, e.g., 'closure's for backtracking in the core reasoner, 'advise' for RacerPro-specific tracing facilities, and compiler-specific tail-call optimizations for saving stack space. Next, the core data structures used in the implementation are investigated to suggest possibilities for extensions to Common Lisp that could help in making Lisp the first choice for reasoner implementation. The conclusion evaluates current deployment possibilities for commercial Lisp-based applications.
Ralf Moeller is Professor for Computer Science at the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) since 2003. From 2001 until 2003 he was Professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Wedel/Hamburg. In 1996, Ralf Moeller received the degree Dr. rer. nat. from the University of Hamburg; and he successfully submitted his Habilitation thesis in 2001 also at the University of Hamburg. His research interests include software technology for distributed systems as well as the application and theory of conceptual modeling and knowledge representation languages. His research goals encompass the development practical inference algorithms for embedding description logic systems into software engineering and web technology. Together with Volker Haarslev (Concordia Univ. Montreal) he is the principal architect of the description logic reasoner Racer, which is being used as a core engine for building ontology development tools, and for agent systems of the semantic web by many research groups around the world. Dr. Moeller was the co-organizer of several international workshops on description logics and is the author of numerous workshop and conference papers as well as several book and journal contributions in this research area. From 2001 to 2004 he was the co-project leader of a DFG project for developing description logic inference systems supporting Aboxes and spatial applications. Since 2005 he has lead the TUHH group of the EC-funded project TONES, which investigate logical formalisms for ontology development and usage. In 2006 he became the leader of the TUHH group of the EC-funded project BOEMIE investigating ontology-learning from interpreting multimedia documents.
Teaching CS to undergraduates at UPMC
Christian Queinnec, Univ. Pierre&Marie Curie [Paris 6] (France)
audio
This presentation is about some experiments done at UPMC since 2000 in the CS undergraduate department. An initiation course, based on Scheme, was introduced offering some facilities for home work and stand alone offline studies. I will describe "Web continuations" that were invented for that occasion. Many of these innovations were ported to other languages or environments to grade students' programs en masse.
PhD in 1978, Technologist for French Ministry of Defence through 1986, Researcher at LIX (Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'École Polytechnique), Leader of ICSLA project at INRIA-Rocquencourt and convener of ISO Lisp standardization process. Full-time teaching at UPMC in 1996, then head of undergraduate CS department 2000 to 2006. Now at LIP6 (Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6 (former alias for UPMC.) Author of several books about languages full of parentheses.
HOP: An Environment for Developing Web2.0 Applications
Manuel Serrano, INRIA Sophia Antipolis (France)
audio
Hop is a language dedicated to programming reactive and dynamic applications for the web, such as web agendas, web galleries, web mail clients, etc. In this presentation, we highlight the linguistic novelties introduced by Hop and its execution environment by describing Hop's user libraries, its extensions to the HTML-based standards, and its execution platform, the Hop web broker. There will be several live demonstrations during the presentation.
Manuel Serrano is a Senior Scientist at Inria Sophia-Antipolis. Involved with Lisp and Scheme since the early 90's (first at Inria Rocquencourt,) he has worked on optimizing compilers for Scheme, and in 1994 he received his PhD. His thesis, titled "Toward a portable and efficient compilation of functional languages," describes a process that initially compiled Scheme to C code (Bigloo.) Maintaining and developing Bigloo has been an important part of Dr. Serrano's research activities. At its beginning this compiler accepted source code in Scheme R4RS extended with modules; but new extensions quickly followed (such as a CLOS-like object layer and multi-threading support). Recent versions provide additional APIs demanded by many modern applications (networking, multi-media facilities, XML skills, etc.). In 2001, and 2002, two new back-ends have been added to Bigloo: a first one for compiling to the JVM, a second one for compiling to the CLR. While a professor at the University of Nice in southern France, he developed Bee, which attempts to provide a richer development environment for Scheme by taking advantage of the language's advanced features. It also provides a symbolic debugger, a memory debugger, a performance profiler, a memory profiler, indexing facilities, and so on, and has been described in several research papers. For the last couple of years, his research focuses on the development of applications for the Web 2.0, particularly with the creation of a new programming language 'Hop' which unsurprisingly rests on top of Scheme. Hop is meant for programming applications such as web agendas, web galleries, web mail clients, etc. Its first version has been released in June 2006.
It's All about Being Right: Lessons from the R6RS Process
Michael Sperber, University of Tuebingen (Germany)
audio
In the Revised Reports on Scheme up to R5RS, the language could only be changed by unanimous consent. It has been widely believed that any language changes made in this way would clearly be the right thing. Arguably, this process reached its limits with the Revised5 Report on Scheme: Crucial language additions such as modules, records and exceptions had little chance of reaching unamimous consent, no matter what the specific design. While the editors of the Revised6 Report no longer follow this rule, standardization is still driven by a strong desire to do the right thing. Continuing the tradition of Lisp culture, reaching this goal has been difficult and elusive, as the participants hold different and strongly opinionated ideas about what the right thing is. In the talk, I will review the R6RS process, and attempt to show that R6RS is indeed the right thing for Scheme.
Mike Sperber is an independent software developer who does computer science research as a hobby. He received his masters and doctorate degrees at the University of T201bingen. His Ph.D. thesis described a professional lighting design and control system written in Scheme. His first book on programming in C on the Atari ST appeared in 1987; his most recent book "Die Macht der Abstraktion" ("The Force of Abstraction"), an introduction to programming using Scheme, appeared in December 2006. Mike has been active in the Scheme community since his undergraduate days in the early 90s. He co-founded the Scheme Request for Implementation (SRFI) process in 1999, and is a co-maintainer of the Scheme 48 implementation of Scheme. He joined the R6RS process in 2002, and is the Project Editor of the Revised6 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme.
Lisp: Themes and History
Herbert Stoyan, University of Erlangen (Germany)
audio
This presentation will cover several themes connected with Lisp. There will be some part about history, some part about semantical equivalences of code pieces in Lisp, etc.
Herbert Stoyan studied Mathematics at the Technical University Dresden, receiving his PhD in 1970. He joined the AI group of Egbert Lehmann at Robotron and learned Lisp. When a computer was available - but no Lisp1.5 manual - he used the 1964 book of Berkeley and Bobrow to implement Lisp. This system, with a compiler added in 1972, was the basis for all AI work in Eastern Germany. In 1977 he began his studies in the history of Lisp, and published a book about the concepts and history of Lisp in 1979. In 1981 he moved to Western Germany and started a career as university teacher. By 1986 he had become Professor of Information Sciences at the University of Konstanz (Constance), in 1989 Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in Darmstadt, and in 1990 Professor of Artificial Intelligence of the University of Erlangen. Beginning in 1992 he focused on knowledge acquisition. His group in Erlangen developed several assistant systems for knowledge acquisition and used these in projects for knowledge based systems and knowledge management systems in industrial applications. With the development of the WWW he created a historical site for people of nobility, and wrote a translator for a heraldic language into Postscript in Scheme. He wrote a two-volume book about Programming in Artificial Intelligence which contains pretty much Lisp code. The book describes several programming languages with diverse execution models (problem solvers, provers, pattern matcher, relational algebra handler, object-based systems etc.)
Lisp-based Platform and Applications for the Inter-domain Network Management
Osamu Akashi, NTT Network Innovation Laboratories (Japan)
Atushi Terauchi, NTT Network Innovation Laboratories (Japan)
Toshio Hirotsu, NTT Network Innovation Laboratories (Japan)
Toshiharu Sugawa, NTT Network Innovation Laboratories (Japan)
audio
Classification Using Conditional Probabilities and Shannon's Definition of Information
Andrew Borden, Palo Alto College, San Antonio, TX (USA)
audio
Our problem is to build a maximally efficient Bayesian classifier when each parameter has a different cost and provides a different amount of information toward the solution. This is an extremely computationally expensive problem. We accept a sub-optimal, although demonstrably good, solution based on Shannon.s definition of Information and Uncertainty. Our solution scales up well and provides powerful diagnostics with no extra work. Our program has been used in Military Command and Control and in developing maintenance diagnostics for a very complex military electronic system. The elements of the solution to the problem are naturally computed recursively, so Lisp implementation is an effective approach.
A Metaobject Protocol for CLforJava
Jay Cotton, College of Charlston (USA)
Jerry Boetje, College of Charlston (USA)
audio
CLforJava is a new implementation of Common Lisp that intertwines its architecture and operation with Java. The authors describe a new architecture for a CLOS MOP that supports transparent, bi-directional access between Lisp and Java. The access requires no special techniques nor syntactic mechanisms on the part of the programmer - being either Java or Lisp. The core of the new MOP is a data structure that melds the fundamental structures of Java instances (N-tuples) and CLOS instances (2-tuples) in such a way that the respective object systems can interact without cumbersome translations. Methods from their respective object systems can interact freely. We discuss certain aspects of the respective MOPs that prevent a complete integration and replacement of one system by the other.
FREEDIUS: Image and Video Understanding in Lisp
Chris Connolly, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA (USA)
audio
SRI's FREEDIUS (Free Image Understanding System) provides a foundation for image and video understanding in geospatial framework. FREEDIUS is written primarily in Common Lisp, using C and C++ for specialized operations, and for incorporating 3rd-party libraries. FREEDIUS supports general image processing operations, sensor modeling, and hierarchies of coordinate transformations and projections. GUI support is provided by foreign function interfaces to Tcl/Tk and OpenGL, allowing fast rendering of images, geometry, and video.
FREEDIUS has been applied to image-based site modeling and visualization, as well as video event analysis. The expressiveness of CLOS permits FREEDIUS to render and inspect objects conditionally depending on data source and visualization mode. In particular, video event analysis is aided by both spatial and temporal views of objects such as tracks derived from monocular or stereo sensors, on both fixed and mobile platforms. Sensors are rigorously modeled so that tracks are precisely registered in space and time. This allows tracks from multiple sources to be visualized in a common reference frame. Site models provide additional geometric context for understanding track events. Spatial and timeline views allow tracks to be browsed and manipulated by location and time.
This demonstration will illustrate transformation hierarchies, site model representations, track representations and visualizations, and video event extraction. The use of CLOS for management and visualization of different track classes, visualization frameworks, and data sources will also be illustrated.
Constraint Propagation in Common Lisp
Stephan Frank, Technical University Berlin, Institute for Software Engineering and Theoretical Computer Science (Germany)
audio
Constraint solving has become an established approach for the handling of complex combinatorial and scheduling problems. We present a constraint solver framework that enables the interchange of most solver aspects through its extensive modular design. Here, we especially focus on the search protocol design.
Liskell: Haskell Semantics with Lisp Syntax
Clemens Fruhwirth
audio
This paper introduces Liskell, a new syntax for Haskell. Liskell belongs to the Lisp family of computer programming language when judged by its syntax, but is mostly Haskell when it comes to language semantics.
We argue that meta-programming in Haskell has not found wide-spread adoption because of the disparity between the abstract syntax tree and its visual appearance in source code form. Liskell uses an extremely minimalistic parse tree and shifts syntactic classification of parse tree parts to a later compiler stage to give parse tree transformers the opportunity to rewrite the parse trees being compiled. These transformers can be user supplied and loaded dynamically into the compiler to extend the language.
This paper introduces the Liskell syntax and serves as first draft for a language definition. We conclude the paper with a demonstration of meta-programming capabilities ranging from quasiquotation to an embedded version of Prolog. We implement Liskell as syntax frontend for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. The implementation is publicly available from http://clemens.endorphin.org/liskell
Knowledge Base for Elementary Geometry On Ontology
Hongguang Fu, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (China)
Xiuqin Zhong, Chinese Academy of Sciences (China)
Wenyuan Wu, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
It illustrates how to use ontology to design and implement knowledge base of elementary geometry. Firstly we introduce the idea, applications and prospects of ontology, then show the building process of geometry ontology. Finally describe the architecture of our knowledge base which is based on geometric ontology. In addition, we present several techniques, such as RDF triple, heuristic forward and backward reasoning, combination rules, numerical-test, reasoning strategies etc., by which it can generate relatively optimum, traditional and readable proofs for geometry theorems, and it can realize the reusability and sharing of domain knowledge.
Computational Tools for the Analysis of Spatial Patterns of Gene Expression in Common Lisp
Cyrus Harmon, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley (USA)
audio
Scientific and technological advances in biotechnology have led to the determination of the sequence of the genomes of a growing number of organisms. Tools such as DNA microarrays offer the ability to determine the levels of expression of substantially all of the genes in a given genome in a single experiment, yet are limited to providing the levels of expression across an ensemble of cells, such as a particular organ or the entire organism. In order to understand the developmental roles of these genes, it is highly desirable not just to know if a given gene expressed, but in which tissues and at which times a given gene is expressed. Using high-throughput laboratory techniques we have constructed an atlas of spatial patterns of gene expression in Drosophila melanogaster imaginal discs. Building such an atlas requires a diverse array of computational techniques and, ideally, the atlas would be presented to the users not just in a static, browsable form, but in a computable form, along with tools to analyze the data contained in the atlas. To this end, we have developed a number of algorithms, tools and libraries, implemented in Common Lisp, to address problems such as matrix and image data representation, computer vision tasks, knowledge representation of the genes in the genome and maps of their global and spatial patterns of gene expression, and to query and analyze these data sets.
Portable Common Lisp Graphical User Interfaces with LTk
Peter Herth, Cadence Design Systems, Feldkirchen (Germany)
audio
While many implementations of Common Lisp provide graphical toolkits, Common Lisp as a whole lacks a standard way of creating graphical user interfaces. This is related to the fact that there is also no portable Common Lisp foreign function interface. To work around this limitation, the Lisp bindings to the Tk graphics toolkit use Lisp streams to talk to a Tcl/Tk subprocess. As a consequence, LTk is a highly portable solution to the GUI problem, allowing LTk based programs to run under 9 different Lisp implementations and the multitude of operation systems supported by Tk. LTk wraps all Tk widgets in CLOS objects, so creating and interacting with widgets is fully integrated into Lisp. Even creating new widgets by inheriting from an existing widget is supported.
The LTk-remote package extends LTk by the ability to use sockets for the communication with the Tcl/TK process and thus is network transparent. To run a LTK-remote program, only a very small Tcl script is needed on the client machine. As the widgets are fully rendered by the Tcl clients, this mechanism is also highly efficient with respect to the necessary network bandwidth.
This paper describes the implementation of LTk and shows the CLOS interface to the Tk widgets.
Modularizing Crosscuts in an E-commerce Application in Lisp using Halo
Charlotte Herzeel, Programming Technology Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)
Kris Gybels, Programming Technology Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)
Pascal Costanza, Programming Technology Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)
Theo D'Hondt, Programming Technology Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)
audio
Some program concerns cannot be cleanly modularized, and their implementation leads to code that is both hard to understand and maintain. In this paper we consider extending an e-commerce application, written in CLOS, with two of such crosscutting concerns. Though most of the time Common Lisp.s macro facilities and CLOS. method combinations can be used to modularize crosscuts, we discuss the use of a more declarative solution when crosscuts depend on the execution history. For this purpose we give an overview of HALO, a novel pointcut language based on logic meta programming and temporal logic, which allows one to reason about program execution and (past) program state.
Experience with SC: Transformation-based Implementation of Various Extensions to C
Tasuku Hiraishi, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University (Japan)
Masahiro Yasugi, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University (Japan)
Taiichi Yuasa, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University (Japan)
audio
We have proposed the SC language system which facilitates language extensions by translation into C. In this paper, we present our experience with the SC language system and discuss its design, implementation, applications and improvements. In particular, we present the improvement to the design of transformation rules for implementing translations, which includes the feature to extend an existing transformation phase (rule-set). This enables us to implement many transformation rule-sets only by describing the difference, and helps us to use commonly-used rule-sets as part of the entire transformation. We also show several actual examples of extensions to C: garbage collection, multithreading and load balancing.
Simple and Efficient Compilation of List Comprehension in Common Lisp
Mario Latendresse, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA (USA)
audio
List Comprehension is a succinct syntactic form to describe lists in functional languages. It uses nested generators (i.e. iterators) and filters (i.e. Boolean expressions). The former generates lists, whereas the latter restricts the contents of these lists. List Comprehension translation is commonly based on Wadler's rules that emit code based on recursive functions. This code often results either in stack overflow or in ineffcient execution for many Common Lisp implementations.
We present a very simple technique to compile List Comprehension in the Loop Facility of Common Lisp, resulting in effcient code that avoids stack overflow. Our translation code is also very short, with an emitted code very close to the user-specified list comprehension.
We also present a translation into more fundamental constructs of Common Lisp that often results in even more efficient code, although this translation is more complex than using the Loop Facility.
The author has used the first translation technique for compiling a new language called BioVelo, which is part of bioinformatics software called Pathway Tools.
The Next 700 Programming Libraries
Antonio Menezes Leitao, INESC-ID / Technical University of Lisbon (Portugal)
audio
Modern software requirements are more diverse than before and can only be timely fulfilled via the extensive use of libraries. As a result, modern programmers spend a significant fraction of their time just mixing and matching these libraries. Programming language success becomes, then, more dependent on the quality and broadness of the accompanying libraries than on the language intrinsic characteristics.
In spite of its recognized qualities, Common Lisp lags behind other languages in what regards the quality and availability of its libraries. We argue that the best solution to overcome this problem is to automatically translate to Common Lisp the best libraries that are available in other languages. In this paper, we specifically address the translation of Java libraries using the Jnil translator tool and we provide a detailed explanation of the problems found and the lessons learned during the translation of a large Java library.
Although many problems remain to be solved, the experiment proved the feasibility of the translation process and significantly increased our confidence in the future of Common Lisp.
A Domain-Specific Language for manipulation of binary data in Dylan
Hannes Mehnert, Dylan Hackers
Andreas Bogk, Dylan Hackers
audio
We present a domain specific language for manipulation of binary data, or structured byte sequences, as they appear in everyday applications such as networking or graphics file manipulation. Our DSL is implemented as an extension of the Dylan language, making use of the macro facility. Dylan macros, unlike Common Lisp macros, are implemented as pattern matches and substitutions on the parse tree, and we will show the strengths and limits of this approach for the given problem. http://www.networknightvision.com/
X-expressions in XMLisp: S-expressions and Extensible Markup Language Unite
Alexander Repenning, University of Colorado (USA) & University of Lugano (Switzerland)
Andri Ioannidou, AgentSheets Inc. (USA)
audio
XMLisp unites S-expressions with XML into X-expressions that unify the notions of data sharing with computation. Using a combination of the Meta Object Protocol (MOP), readers and printers, X-expressions uniquely integrate XML at a language, not API level, into Lisp in a way that could not be done with other programming languages. CLOS objects can be directly serialized into XML. XML expressions can be evaluated in listeners, complete or sub-elements of XML can be evaluated in regular Lisp editors such as EMACS, and XML can even be compiled using the Common Lisp compiler. Existing tools such as inspectors will print XML expressions and allow users to interactively explore complex XML structures. Because of this type of integration, XML becomes much more tangible to developers enabling the incremental development style Lisp programmers have become accustomed to. This article describes XMLisp in the context of the AgentCubes simulation and game-authoring tool. AgentCubes is the 3D version of AgentSheets system, which is the world.s most distributed Lisp-based educational simulation and game-authoring tool.
Extensible Sequences in Common Lisp
Christophe Rhodes, Goldsmiths, University of London (England)
audio
Common Lisp is often touted as the programmable programming language, yet it sometimes places large barriers in the way, with the best of intentions. One of those barriers is a limit to the extensibility by the user of certain core language constructs, such as the ability to define subclasses of built in classes usable with standard functions: even where this could be achievable with minimal penalties. We introduce the notion of user-extensible sequences, describing a protocol which implementations of such classes should follow. We show examples of their use, and discuss the issues observed in providing support for this protocol in a Common Lisp, including ensuring that there is no performance impact from its inclusion.
Demonstration: LispWorks & cross-platform graphical application
Martin Simmons, Lispworks Ltd, Cambridge (England)
audio
LispWorks is an integrated development environment for ANSI Common Lisp. The feature-rich environment and its unique cross-platform graphical toolkit make LispWorks the ideal tool for Common Lisp application development and deployment.
This demonstration will show development of an application for managing tenanted pieces of land. The application uses the CLOS-based CAPI graphical toolkit and connects to a database using Common SQL.
The demonstration will show how LispWorks makes the Lisp development process easier with its intuitive, integrated environment. The tools shown will include:
By the end we will have a multi-platform graphical application with a common code base.
ESA: A CLIM Library for Writing EMACS-style Applications
Robert Strandh, LaBRI, Université Bordeaux (France)
Troels Henriksen, DIKU, University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
David Murray, ADMurray Associates, Paris (France)
Christophe Rhodes, Goldsmiths, University of London (England)
audio
We describe ESA (for Emacs-Style Application), a library for writing applications with an Emacs look-and-feel within the Common Lisp Interface Manager. The ESA library takes advantage of the layered design of CLIM to provide a command loop that uses Emacs-style multi-keystroke command invocation. ESA supplies other functionality for writing such applications such as a minibuffer for invoking extended commands and for supplying command arguments, Emacs-style keyboard macros and numeric arguments, file and buffer management, and more. ESA is currently used in two major CLIM applications: the Climacs text editor (and the Drei text gadget integrated with the McCLIM implementation), and the Gsharp score editor. This paper describes the features provided by ESA, gives some detail about their implementation, and suggests avenues for further work.
CL-SNA: Social Network Analysis with Lisp
Mehmet Gençer, Istanbul Bilgi University (Turkey)
Vehbi Sinan Tunalıoğlu, Istanbul Bilgi University (Turkey)
Hikmet Coşkun Gündüz, Istanbul Bilgi University (Turkey)
audio
Research on social networks in various contexts requires processing of graphs representing social relations in specialized ways. This paper presents an overview of the Lisp application, CL-SNA, being developed for social network analysis. CL-SNA aims to provide a convenient and flexible interface for social network researchers and to be easy to extend. Despite its infancy in terms of the coverage of social network metrics implemented, it does offer integration with a common visualization framework and utilities to import or export data between common social network representation formats used in the research. As such, it provides a framework which is extensible with new analysis procedures.
DAUTI - Automated Universal Traffic Inspector
Jonathan Wellons, Vanderbilt University (USA)
John Wisneski, Vanderbilt University (USA)
audio
This paper introduces DAUTI, a network traffic simulator, applies it to a simulation research problem, and demonstrates the ease-of-use and applicability of functional languages to network simulation. DAUTI is an Open-Source, fully configurable, rapidly advancing, and efficient Scheme program that can be used to simulate Cluster load and job delay on any size of network, and provide basic statistics and analysis. In this paper, we use DAUTI to compute the relative performance of load distribution algorithms on a two-stage pipeline with heterogeneous cluster sizes. Specific applications include web servers, and industrial, research and financial batch processing. The choice of the Scheme language (a relative of Lisp) presented numerous opportunities to quickly produce compact and efficient code. This language selection incurred no obstacles.
Dynamic ADTs: a "don't ask, don't tell" policy for data abstraction
Geoff Wozniak, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Mark Daley, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Stephen Watt, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
audio
We outline an approach to abstract data types (ADTs) that allows an object of the type specified by the ADT to take on one of many possible representations. A dynamic abstract data type (DADT) is dual to dynamic algorithm selection and facilitates profiling of data in conjunction with the profiling of code. It also permits a programmer to delay or ignore details pertaining to data representation and enhance the efficiency of some algorithms by changing representations at run time without writing code extraneous to the algorithm itself. Additionally, we demonstrate that run time optimization of data objects is possible and allows for acceptable performance compared to traditional ADTs. An implementation is presented in Common Lisp.
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