Re: unboxed structure fields (or class slots)
"Yuri Davidovsky (as work at disclosure dot ie)" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.lisp.lispworks.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
> On 9 Jan 2026, at 15:51, Bradford Miller <[email protected]> wrote: I would actually argue that lisp was indeed used to construct the reality. It is rather easy to demonstrate. There is a concept called “tree of life”, where various species and organisms split further and further away from each other in the process of evolution, forming the aforementioned tree-looking structure. And trees are the natural structure that list based programs acquire (although one might argue that an AST from any language after tokenisation and parsing is, well, a tree, however a lisp program IS the AST itself). The evolution process works not unlike lisps, where you can have a jar with a label saying “Common Lisp” with many similar looking little lisps in it, but once you take a pinch of them out and put them on the table top, they instantly start to crawl away from each other as fast as possible, oftentimes squeaking at one another a little in the process (and they squeak together a lot at inhabitants of another jar with a label “Unix”). After some time they diverge so much that you cannot put them back into the jar and they cannot cross with each other anymore (meaning, one lisp’s program cannot run on other lisps’ runtimes any longer). Lexical scoping. The reality appears to form scopes around us too. For example, we have an individual’s inner world (the innermost lexical scope), then we have their family (an outer scope), the street, city, country, and so on, each forming an ever larger scope of context. Two families living in the same street are two separate scopes with their own histories, known events (“remember dad getting hammered during Christmas and making a mess out of himself at the dinner table while the in-laws were visiting?”) and running in-jokes. There is no overlap between them. However both families share the context and knowledge of the area and city they are living in. I could think of a few other concepts, but those appear to be common for all programming languages and seem a bit less interesting, so those two things might do for now. It does seem overall that reality with its fractal-like organisation is much better described by the recursive nature that fits into the picture so well when processing lisp code structures. _______________________________________________ Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users [email protected] http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html