[self-interest] blocks and closures

[Albertina Lourenci]

Stephane Ducasse wrote:
Hi Stef!
It is cool to hear from you!!!


> Hi albertina
>
> to drive a car do you read how combustion happen at the molecular level
> or just
> take a driving license?

I don't drive in Brazil because the traffic is chaotic!! I am unable to kill
even an insect!
For example right now I have received a letter from IT from Copenhagen
concerning my PHD application!
There are 97 candidates and they made up their mind to interview people!
How cool! Me a woman a poor Brazilian have to cope with this luxurious
Scandinavian requirement! As far as I know in Scandinavia the laws are
done for the poorest of the system!
Anyhow sustainable development started with the Brundtland Report in 1987!
In Australia 50% of the scholarships are for women! They deserve it! And all
over the world measures are being taken to promote women development!

Since I am an excellent "thermodynamic researcher", I prefer to look things
from a post-quantum viewpoint where in past lives I have been reincarnating
as
a man! Now I am a woman!
And simply ignore I am a woman!! If I want to make the fourth law of
thermodynamics work for me I have to respect the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. I will move the world, run all sorts of risk
and try to go there simply because Anker Helms Jorgensen appreciates
my proposal! And is giving me a chance to do the right thing to be done to
save
Mankind and Mother Earth! While the rest of the community is thinking about
bank accounts and so on! They don't realize that the "green dollars" will
supersede
the "petrodollars"! See the shameful war USA Iraqui due to this hurdle!!!

And the farthest you are from the inorganic soup
the greatest the trend to defeat you as you are doing right now!!!

I would love to pick up a flexible, friendly interactive agile artistic
programming
language and start building sustainable cities right now!!
Why can't I do this? Of course because things are the way
I wrote in previous message!!!

Since obviously the best languages to tune with my intention is
LISP SMALLTALK and so on I cannot continue ignoring it,
I have to build an aspectual collaborative aware architecture!
My domain model is three-layered, the ecodesign model is ready
the geoemtric model is perfect and now I need this collaborative
aware architecture!!! How can I implement it to work with
hundreds of designers and thousands of clients? Where to respect
the client's needs and the competence to express "opinion" of the
designers mimicking natural language demands an implementation
code where we can do these things!!!

Well then Alistair Cockburn and other from the Smalltalk Community
have introduced Agile Software Development!!! Wonderful this does
not work for architecture because we do not build houses with
words, we build with SHAPES!
And then miraculously all computer scientists made their oldfashioned
methodologies Agile!!! See my Third POstdoctorate Scientific Report!
http://www.lsi.usp.br/~lourenci

And the BAbel effect in computer science continues....:-)!

You should understand that architecture is not a scientific reasoning
and does not fit the class concept! It is necessary to introduce another
abstraction mechanism! For example inspired by the notion of species
developed in The Savage Mind by Claude Levi Strauss!
Perhaps I can build this on top of Self or Smalltalk or Squeak !
Or LISP!



>
>
> I guess the second, so the paper you are refetring to is not a guide to
> learn Smalltalk this is an article that puts in perspective why
> Smalltalk.
> and Smalltalk comes from Lisp, simula and Logo.

I have already studied Smalltalk to program in Self imagine!!!
How ridiculous!

> Still you can learn in
> this paper the  intention behing it which for a language designer is
> important.
>

Sure and it is clear for me Alan Kay's intention is a far cry from the
autopoieitic and hermeneutic and semiotic reasoning of my ecodesign model!!!
I want to check if his use of LISP make it more palatable to approach my
aims and how and how much!

>
> If you want to learn Smalltalk download one of the books available on
> my web page. there is no lisp inside.

I feel Smalltalk is superior to LISP! However my work fits within the
emergent paradigm Aspect Oriented Software development! Here
functions, procedures, objects rules are all being deconstructed!!!
While in my ecodesign model I do not need to deconstruct anything!
It is just aspectual, infinite beautifully built like the infinite!
So like great architects of ancient Indian times, I need to reconstruct
the Universe to make my ideas grow! The outcome is build things
that even five-year-old child can understand!

Special thanks for your comments!

Best wishes
Albertina

>
>
> Free books for Universities at
> http://www.esug.org/sponsoring/promotionProgram.html
> Free Online Book at
> http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/WebPages/FreeBooks.html
>
> Stef
>
> PS for the closures, this is a really powerful abstraction that a lot
> of languages completely missed. Inner classes for examples ;)
>
> On Sunday, April 13, 2003, at 06:48 PM, Albertina Lourenci wrote:
>
> >  Dear All!
> >
> > Curiously not wanting to provoke you or offend you, Smalltalk was
> >   > the only language among Basic,  Fortran ( I studied Fortran when I
> >   > was nineteen years old and a Biological Sciences student concerned
> > with
> >   > ecological modeling - my ex-husband was the professor, he was
> > teaching
> >   > a graduate course for electronic engineers! I was the best
> > student! I
> >   > got
> >   > 10 and he has not at all helped me! Indeed he hated to teach me
> >   > anything!)
> >   >
> >   > , Pascal, C,  Modula, Oberon, Simula,
> >   > C++, Eiffel, Sather, CLOS, Beta (The Mjolner Beta System and the
> >   > Simula system)
> >   > that I was unable to study by myself!
> >
> >   This is fun because for me this is the opposite. But I come from a
> > lisp
> >   background and I not syntax-aware and not polluted by {}.
> >
> >
> > OK! Let's check how wonderful and didactic it is to study Smalltalk
> > and associated languages!
> >
> > First of all, I have read nine pages from the paper The Early History
> > of
> > Smalltalk that may be downloaded from http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
> >
> > and has recently been published at ACM SIGOLAN Notices, vol. 28 no.3
> > March 1993
> > Alan Kay is very honest and makes evident how naïve and simple ideas
> > dawned on the computer scientists to keep the ball rolling are woven
> > into
> > computer systems!
> > Then it is up to the users to reject them or simply pretend they are
> > doing
> > research on computer science that is really having impact on the change
> > of the quality of life on Mother Earth! Sorry if I do not manage to
> > teach
> > seventeen-year old architects how to program complex systems such
> > as to design and plan sustainable cities, I do not see mankind is
> > really
> > building a sustainable basis for our cities. Hence everybody will face
> > collapse soon! Nobody cares about this of course! But I do care! This
> > is
> > my mission!
> >
> > Alan Kay says: The bridge to an object-based system could be in terms
> > of each object as a syntax-directed interpreter of messages sent to
> > it. = unify
> > OO semantics with the ideal of a completely extensible language
> >
> > Just perfect:-)! Then to continue reading the rest of paper he takes
> > for
> > granted that I know about car, cdr,  cons eval apply functions, lambda
> > expressions, quotes conds etc!
> > Then I start reading On Lisp from Paul Graham you can download on site
> > http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.htm or html?
> >
> > Of course not only does he explain nothing about car, cdr, cons etc
> > and
> > worse introduce lots of expressions and commands I have never heard
> > of!!!
> > For example can someone explain to me how can I understand the
> > following
> > closure to make a new database?
> >
> > (defun make-dbms (db)
> >     (list
> >       #'(lambda (key)
> >            (cdr (assoc key db))
> >       #'(lambda (key val)
> >            (push (cons key val) db)
> >            key)
> >        #'(lambda  (key)
> >             (setf db  (delete key db :key  #' car))
> >              key)))
> >
> > For me this is a nightmare! And the same obstacles I find when I try
> > to delve deeper into Smalltalk and Self!!! It is worse than
> > biochemistry
> > because in biochemistry every new enzyme or organic product that
> > appears
> > one knows why! I mean it is a coherent whole!
> > Special thanks and apologies for complaining, but I do need to
> > understand
> > the gist of exploratory programming. Is it the same as bottom-up
> > programming
> > what's the difference?
> > Have a fun-filled peaceful creative weekend
> > Albertina
> >
> >
> > tb at becket.net wrote:
> >
> > James McCartney <asynth at io.com> writes:
> >
> > > It depends on the Smalltalk.
> > > A full closure can be returned from a function and still refer to
> > that
> > > function's variables. Self disallows this, as do some Smalltalks I
> > > beleive. If you support this feature you can no longer put all your
> > > local variables on the stack, because references to them may outlive
> > > the function activation in which they were created.
> >
> > This is a fiction that the Smalltalk crowd likes to talk about, and
> > it's a shame that the Self crowd also repeats it.
> >
> > In languages which support closures, it is rare to return them.  Most
> > functions never return them.  So you can store such local variables on
> > the stack just fine, for all but the minority of functions which
> > return closures.
> >
> > But what about the ones that do?  Well, if you didn't return a
> > closure, you'd have to do something else to hold the same data, some
> > kind of allocation, and that has just whatever cost the alternative
> > non-stack compilation has for the same data.
> >
> > There is a wrinkle because Smalltalk and Self use internal closures
> > (whether real or pseudo) for control structures to a higher degree
> > than Lisp/Scheme usually do.  However, it is still very rare to
> > actually return them.
> >
> > A Lisp/Scheme system therefore can use non-stack allocation for any
> > function where a closure is created, even if it is not returned (that
> > is, if it can be taken to have dynamic extent).  But this is not
> > strictly necessary--Smalltalk and Self do just fine with
> > pseudo-closures, that is, closures with merely dynamic extent.
> >
> > So, since Smalltalk/Self code is more aggressive in creating closures,
> > which are typically not returned, the trick is for the compiler to
> > detect ones which won't be returned.  This is in general a matter of
> > detecting aliasing, and it's not too tough for the common uses of
> > closures in Smalltalk and Self.
> >
> > So, my suggestion is to bite the bullet and do it right.  Demand real
> > closures.
> >
> > If you think this is "too hard", then what are you doing with
> > Smalltalk and Self anyhow?  The whole glory here is that things that
> > are "too hard" can, indeed, be made quite tractible through good
> > compilation.  In the case of closures, the techniques are well-known,
> > and it's a shame that the Smalltalk/Self crowd mostly disregard them.
> >
> >
> >
> > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
> > http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
> >
> > <lourenci.vcf>
> Prof. Dr. Stéphane DUCASSE
> http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
>   "if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do
> different? ...  especially if,
>   by doing something different, today might not be your last day on
> earth" Calvin&Hobbes
>
> "The best way to predict the future is to invent it..." Alan Kay.
>
> Open Source Smalltalks: http://www.squeak.org,
> http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/smalltalk.html
> Free books for Universities at
> http://www.esug.org/sponsoring/promotionProgram.html
> Free Online Book at
> http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/WebPages/FreeBooks.html
>
> Prof. Dr. Stéphane DUCASSE
> http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
>   "if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do
> different? ...  especially if,
>   by doing something different, today might not be your last day on
> earth" Calvin&Hobbes
>
> "The best way to predict the future is to invent it..." Alan Kay.
>
> Open Source Smalltalks: http://www.squeak.org,
> http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/smalltalk.html
> Free books for Universities at
> http://www.esug.org/sponsoring/promotionProgram.html
> Free Online Book at
> http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/WebPages/FreeBooks.html
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