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Marvin Minsky - The Beauty of the Lisp Language

123 2020-10-10 19:46

In before someone rants about LISP machines and C Processing Units:
Processor features are always dependent on software demands,
if LISP features were actually dependent on hardware
LISPers would program FPGAs and create a consumer demand for such CPUs with LISP-centric features, like Forth did with various forth processors/boards.
Why no FPGA-based LISP machines to demonstrate how superior LISP is ? Tensor Processing Units exist to solve Neural Networks faster.
If there is a way to throw hardware at the problem, why they stopped with LISP machines?

124 2020-10-10 20:18

Reality has a strong imperative bias, where "LISP Machines" would actually run imperative code faster than LISP itself, because
the hardware is serial and imperative due architecture and merely has additional blocks to speed up LISP construct execution.
True LISP-centric architecture has never actually been tried,
IMHO as a C programmer, the pervasive use of lists as data clashes with dumb storage memory optimized for throughput:
LISP machines don't fix this, they're basically same dumb memory with extra bits to indicate some type/state, tasks were just offloaded to CPU.
What is actually needed is 'content addressable memory' Field Encoded Words (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory#cite_note-WisePowers-5 ) where such "Database Operations" are List Processing directives(i.e. core primitives).
It was used for Prolog, but imagine its being adapted to LISP - the memory itself of course being same as LISP machine tagged architecture memory.
``An alternative approach to implementation is based on Superimposed Code Words or Field Encoded Words which are used for more efficient database operations, information retrieval and logic programming, with hardware implementations based on both RAM and head-monitoring disk technology.[5][6]``

125 2020-10-10 20:39

>>124 some papers on this:
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2458(08)60326-5
https://doi.org/10.1117/12.936986
https://web.cs.umass.edu/publication/docs/1983/UM-CS-1983-032.pdf
http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/1997/CMU-CS-97-162.ps
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/34086
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA246774.pdf

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