Completely b0rked, yup#

Wed, 06 Feb 2002 02:17:57 +0000

Completely b0rked, yup. It's using the #defines for IEEE rounding/trap/exception settings, but attempting to set the hardware fpcr with them directly instead of using ieeesetfp_control() and friends. Not surprisingly, this doesn't work. Nor does it work in CMUCL for Linux/Alpha (at least, on my computer). I'm at a loss to see how it could have worked on OSF1^WDigital Unix^W^WTru64 either, but I think we just trust that it did.

The man at the guitar shop phoned yesterday, so I went round to visit today. It looks like this; up close, bits of it look like this, this, and this. Now all I have to do is learn to play it. Easy.

OK, so suddenly everybody has an opinion on .NET; it seems like I may as well give you mine too. Here goes

• Copying an MS API gives me the creeps. It feels like Open Source is playing perpetual catchup with Redmond's Moving Goalposts, and I'm not totally convinced that this time the target is firmly planted. But I don't have any actual evidence that it won't be, so perhaps I had better Just Get Over It.

• The CLR is a nice virtual machine, if for some reason you need a virtual machine. Certainly beats the JVM (not, I grant you, that that's very hard). Most of the missing stuff in, say, CL (multimethods, a proper numeric tower, symbols, keyword arguments, etc) can be implemented on top of it

• The problem is that the CLR is also supposed to be a common interface language. If I'm programming in some putative Common Lisp .NET, any of my interfaces which use multimethods, arbitrary-sized numbers, symbols, or flexible argument list processing are not going to be available (or at least, meaningful) to users of other .NET-enabled languages. So, I can't use many of the natural idioms of my language in anything which is going to be exported. I'm going to take a guess that users of other "esoteric" (I say "high level") languages are in a similar situation; any general-use libraries in .NET are going to be either mostly written in C#, or mostly written in some arbitrary C#-like subset of whatever language they are in.

• I don't actually have a solution to this. I'm not sure there is one; I think it's a very hard problem. This is why it annoys me to read claims that Microsoft have found it.

The Deblog seems to be offline, so I replaced it with lemonodor - which I've been meaning to link to for a while, but was looking for another word to add to the first sentence.