217 karma · joined January 6, 2011
For historical reasons, I would call Scheme a Lisp, and I would not use the word Lisp as synonymous to Common Lisp. Common Lisp surfaced after Scheme, and Lisp was used of programming languages even before Scheme.
round (fromIntegral x / fromIntegral y)
round is one of several functions that transform numbers to integers.
Also, I was confused by the package management with Cabal, and now I appear to have broken it with an error message whenever I start ghci. When choosing a first language for students, you have to think of idiots such as me.
At first, I thought of making a Lisp-based system, but I realized that wouldn't be a good idea technically. To have something like the Lisp machine system, you needed special purpose microcode. That's what made it possible to run programs as fast as other computers would run their programs and still get the benefit of typechecking. Without that, you would be reduced to something like the Lisp compilers for other machines. The programs would be faster, but unstable. Now that's okay if you're running one program on a timesharing system — if one program crashes, that's not a disaster, that's something your program occasionally does. But that didn't make it good for writing the operating system in, so I rejected the idea of making a system like the Lisp machine.
Is this something that is still relevant to modern attempts at making a Lisp operating system?
At the same time there have been massive targeting of parents of autistic children by quack therapists.