lispm

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h...

> https://www.dw.com/en/are-nigers-uranium-supplies-to-france-...

"He added that some 90% of Niger's population has no electricity, and price exploitation means Niger today also receives too little income for its exports."

https://reliefweb.int/report/niger/niger-uranium-blessing-or...

"Instead, say local and international organisations, uranium mining by foreign-dominated companies has caused environmental damage and health problems in the far north of the country."

"Niger is the world's third to fifth-ranking producer of uranium, producing over 3,000 tonnes of uranium a year. However, the UN Development Programme's 2006 Human Development Index considers Niger the poorest country in the world, where life expectancy is 45 years old, 71 percent of adults cannot read, and 60 percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day."

These things don't look good, I would say.

> > If this thing blows up, then what happens? > Ahahaha you have to study nuclear energy more.

You have to do that. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is a nuclear power plant, which is in the war zone in the Ukraine. Russia is attacking for months the electricity production and distribution in the Ukraine. If the cooling of the nuclear powerplant gets destroyed, then we have a possible meltdown or other scenarios. We already have a million refugees from the Ukraine in Germany. If a nuclear powerplant in the Ukraine gets destroyed (for example because Russia decides to bomb it), then we potentially will see millions more refugees.

So much for safe energy. There are nuclear powerplants in a warzone in Europe, and this affects us all. Direct or indirectly.

> Which catastrophes?

You really can use Google? Just recently in the news: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/04/22/russias-record-flo...

We have here former uranium mines, which were exploited by and for Russia. Google for "Wismut". It costs us many billions to clean up the russian legacy.

> Its cheap and clean, its a fact.

Selective data does not make it "cheap" and "clean". It also does not make it a fact. Consumer prices are also not "facts" about the complete cost structure of nuclear power. Consumer prices are designed by energy policy. Much of the costs of nuclear power are not payed by consumers, but by tax payers (Nuclear Power Plants can't be insured, unlike solar panels -> the tax payer will pay for these events -> for example a single Earth Quake in Japan causes costs the tax payer of several hundred billion dollars -> TEPCO, the owner of several damaged powerplants lacks the money to pay for that...

If this thing blows up, then what happens?

> fact remains that it delivers reliable, cheap, and clean electricity

That's your opinion, it's not a fact. Don't think that your opinions are facts and thus automatically what other people say is wrong. Be honest in communication with other people, so that your opinions are just opinions. You can argument in favor of your opinions, but they remain opinions and are not facts, just because YOU believe in them.

> So I suppose you have been against the closure of German reactors, right?

I'm for closing of nuclear reactors. You ignore the other things I said: nuclear power plants work only in a political environment, where they got a state-support/owned monopoly. Who do you think insures them? Who do you think sets up the regulatory environment that the get a large part of the market, who do you think is setting up the environment for waste storage. Hint: it's the government. We have extremely costly state financed clean-up operations for nuclear waste storage. These are old reactors.

To massively reduce the world co2 production, there is currently only ONE way known: massive scaling of renewable energy. The contribution of nuclear energy is neither cheap, nor clean, nor safe. It also does not scale. Nuclear energy stagnates since decades. Remember: China is bringing new coal power plants online, each week there are new ones.

Thus the industrialized countries have the responsibility (and the opportunity) to develop and share renewable energy technology, to be able be much faster in deployment, with improving technology. It's the only cost effective way known, which also can make a sizeable contribution.

Common Lisp has left brackets like {} and [] to the user (aka developer). It supports "reader macros", where the user can extend/supersede the syntax of s-expressions.

So, specialized tools/libraries/applications can introduce these brackets for their own use. Examples are embedded SQL expressions, notations for Frames (special objects, in kind of a mix of OOP and Logics), grammar terms, etc.

Thus it explicitly supports the idea of "people will introduce new brackets with new meanings".

"the U.S. Government will move into markets currently dominated by Russian and Chinese State Owned Enterprises (SOE) and recover our position as the world leader in exporting best-in-class nuclear energy technology, and with it, strong non-proliferation standards"

Russia and China have state owned enterprises. Now the US government will move into their markets...

"The U.S. has ceded its leadership position to countries with state-owned-enterprises, including Russia and China,"

The US government is the actor who is directing the US industry.

> The claim that renewables foster "local ownership" and "distributed industry" oversimplifies the reality.

The topic was that "we", Germany, don't want this. We want to strengthen local ownership of energy production. There are a lot of examples here. Nuclear power plants are so far large (large plants are more cost effective) and based on large monopolies (granted or even owned by the government).

Example: Before the movement towards renewable energy, the grid and the electricity production was owned by only four large companies each occupying a region in Germany.

The electricity grid was then taken away from them and opened to many players. Now (basically) everyone has the right to be a producer and to feed electricity into the grid. Now we have a large landscape of energy producers, with the goal to establish this across the EU.

Nuclear power plants (owned by very few companies in protected markets) are dinosaurs in the effort to create dynamic energy markets.

Nuclear power demands long-term contracts and guaranteed prices for huge monopolistic players. See for example the new nuclear power plants in the UK...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

"EDF has negotiated a guaranteed fixed price – a "strike price" – for electricity from Hinkley Point C under a government sanctioned Contract for difference (CfD)."

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/france-seeks-more-uk...

"PARIS, Jan 25 (Reuters) - France wants the British government to contribute more money to two new nuclear plants its state-owned energy utility EDF was contracted to build in the UK, given delays and spiralling costs, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters."

A state-owned French company builds for the British government a nuclear power plant.

We are not talking about a distorted "free market". There is no market at all, it's all government controlled: building and financing.

The nuclear industry in these countries is mostly owned and fullydirected by the government: electricity providers and companies selling&building nuclear powerplants.

Nuclear power is especially strong when central governments direct & pay for the the industry, which is far from a free market. China: authoritarian dictatorship with centrally planned economy. France: government owned. Japan: government directed, TEPCO rescued by the government.

Nuclear: big government. Centralized. State-owned monopolies.

Renewable energy: lots of energy producers, strong local ownership, distributed industry, distributed grid, markets for energy, ...

It is OWNED by the French state. The French government rescued its nuclear industry from bankruptcy.

> It's amusing how your arguments against nuclear are purely ideological and filled with intellectual dishonesty.

Personal attacks don't support your point of view.

I'm out.

You should be able to see for yourself that your argumentation is nonsense.

For Japan the accusation is that the Government by purpose produced this stockpile of Plutonium, also by creating a certain nuclear industry, to be in a position to create nuclear weapons, if they see it necessary. That's a political decision and the nuclear industry around nuclear powerplants is an enabler, created by the government via its energy and defense policies.

> It's not like a power plant reactor gives you the weapon technology magically.

They designed it.

Remember, you claimed that there is no connection. I reality, government set up nuclear industry such that it supports their weapon programs.

> All year? What happens when there is no wind and no sun?

You can find out. There is enough information about this topic.

A renewable energy landscape is more than just "wind & sun". An electricity grid is also more than a nuclear fleet in France, which for weeks&months had poor availability.

"In France, state-controlled EDF's nuclear output dropped by 30% in 2022, to 279 TWh, as more than half of its 56 reactors were taken offline for repairs which had been delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic"

I was under the impression that that problem is easier solvable than making nuclear cost effective and making it scale in a safe way. For decades nuclear power deployment stagnates, while renewable technology is rapidly expanding and getting cheaper by the day, with more storage options. Nuclear power already has difficulty keeping the current level of electricity production, while increasingly outdated and aging nuclear powerplants need to be replaced.

> rising the electricity prices happened

The state rescued the French nuclear industry from bankruptcy, it's now a full government owned monopolistic electricity energy landscape. If the electricity price would be high enough to pay for the costs of the nuclear landscape, that would not have happened. Why were companies like Areva such a commercial failure?

That's not true. For example Japan has Plutonium for several thousand nuclear weapons, where the Plutonium comes from reprocessing of fuel of Nuclear Power Plants.

https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-10/features/japans-misg...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency

Take Iran, which was hiding their nuclear weapons program behind a nuclear energy program. -> "Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful,[58] and had then enriched uranium to less than 5 percent, consistent with fuel for a civilian nuclear power plant."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran

> It's easy to say that "renewables doubled last year" when they go from "marginal" to "still marginal"

60% electricity from renewable for Germany is far from marginal.

Plus most nuclear powerplants don't cover the costs after a shutdown, incl. dealing with the materials and their radiation. We have often seen that the money available is not covering the costs of dealing with waste, spent fuel, etc. -> tax payer covers it -> the French government can't increase the state controlled electricity prices, without huge public protests.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1626950/the-fax-is-sti...

I was flying back from munich to hamburg last week, with a passenger jet, which is produced in my hometown, with internet in the plane - not a fax.

Renewable energy is hugely increasing world wide.

Like renewable energy? 1st quarter 2024: 58,4% electricity from renewable energy. Up from 48.5% last year.

I doubt that the early small memory Intel-based machines played much of a role for Lisp programmers or even education (other than being used as a terminal to a different machine). Lisp was memory hungry, due to the interactive use (with resident dev tools) with a garbage collected heap. The 386 supported virtual memory and various other ways to extend the available RAM was used on early intel machines under the various DOS variants...

My Symbolics 3640 Lisp Machine, a model introduced in the mid 1980s had 20 MB RAM and 200 MB virtual memory on one or two disks. The OS was already a 50 MB image. The memory used by Lisp was typically much larger than the available (and/or affordable) RAM.

Access times were far from constant.

A full Garbage Collection over virtual memory took 30 minutes. That's why it had extensive support for incremental garbage collection, copying GC, manual memory management, areas for various data types, ephemeral GC with hardware support, cdr-coded lists, various types of multidimensional arrays, graphics cards with special video memory, 36 bit memory with additional ECC, ...

Before saving a new Lisp image to disk, one was using a special command to reorder objects in memory to optimize access times. That command also took 20-30 minutes.

Lisp Machines like this were developed because Lisp systems on Mainframes or Mini Computers were thrashing the machines during GC and making performance hell for Lisp users and other time sharing users. Thus a personal machine was needed where the memory and CPU belong to one user. They were among the very first commercially available GUI based personal workstations in 1981.

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...

There are implementations which check these type constraints. So it is best to check the manual or ask the maintainers. IIRC there were implementations which added it on user requests.

But don't think all "Common Lisp" implementations will check those constraints, for example ABCL does not. Some don't and in others it can be turned off.

OpusModus is a music composition system for macOS and MS Windows, programmable in Common Lisp.

https://opusmodus.com

Superbooth is the world’s largest trade fair and festival for electronic music instruments, which was held at FEZ Berlin / Germany from the 16th to the 18th of May 2024.

https://www.superbooth.com/en/

Don't learn wrong things. Lisp has operators and no, not everything is a function. LET for example is not a function. It is a built-in special operator in Common Lisp. Similar in other Lisp dialects. Scheme R7RS documents "let" as syntax: https://standards.scheme.org/corrected-r7rs/r7rs-Z-H-6.html#... with a "named let" as a variant: https://standards.scheme.org/corrected-r7rs/r7rs-Z-H-6.html#...

In Emacs Lisp: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/eintr/le...

"The let expression is a special form in Lisp..."

Also: limiting the redefinition of standard operators is not backwards, it's useful, to prevent to crash a Lisp, since in Lisp function names are often late bound. -> changing a core function will have immediate effect on all code using that.

Macros are also not "function". Macros are operators which expand source code to new source code.

Lisp typically has these operator types:

  * functions, which are operators which get called with evaluated arguments
  * macros, which are operators, which get called with source code and which return new source code
  * special operators (QUOTE, LET, DEFUN, SETQ, IF, ...), which are typically hard-wired in the implementation with both syntax and semantics. Scheme has a set of those, too.
 

The glossary of Common Lisp explains "operator": https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/26_gl...

  operator n.
  1. a function, macro, or special operator.
  2. a symbol that names such a function, macro, or special operator.
  3. (in a function special form) the cadr of the function special form, which might be either an operator[2] or a lambda expression.
  4. (of a compound form) the car of the compound form, which might be either an operator[2] or a lambda expression, and which is never (setf symbol).

In standard Common Lisp it is UNDEFINED what happens when one redefines a standard operator of Common Lisp. Typical implementations will signal an error (which often provides a restart). Typical implementations will also extend this to other protected packages, such that the user can't accidentally replace an operator and the Lisp system may crash.

For example... one can easily express all that in Common Lisp:

https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/04_b....

    CL-USER 9 > (defun non-empty-string-p (string) (and (stringp string) (plusp (length string))))
    NON-EMPTY-STRING-P

    CL-USER 10 > (deftype name-type () `(and string (satisfies non-empty-string-p)))
    NAME-TYPE

    CL-USER 11 > (deftype age-type () `(integer 18 120))
    AGE-TYPE

    CL-USER 12 > (defun foo (age name)
                   (declare (type age-type  age)
                            (type name-type name))
                   (print (list age name)))
    FOO

    CL-USER 4 > (deftype name-type () `(and string (not (string 0))))
    NAME-TYPE

    CL-USER 5 > (typep "hello" 'name-type)
    T

    CL-USER 6 > (typep "" 'name-type)
    NIL

SBCL has this extended with type declarations as assertions: http://sbcl.org/manual/index.html#Handling-of-Types

Eiffel had promoted Design by Contract for a long time.

> Cisco built their cybersecurity platform using Clojure.

Cisco uses a lot of software. Your Clojure marketing attempts are getting silly.

> This was not a problem on earlier CPUs because all memory was the same with similar access time.

That's not true. Many early systems had small RAM sizes (example: a DEC VAX 11/780 had a few Megabytes and often served dozens of users) and 10 (or more) times larger slow virtual memory.

Lisp systems then tried to deal with that with the first generational garbage collectors, often also compacting (related objects stayed near in memory). Ephemeral GCs watched for changed memory in RAM.