[geeks] vmstat modification

[joshua d boyd]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 10:25:58PM -0400, dave at cca.org wrote:
> >would be feasible from that distance either).  Pretty much, I hoping for
> >something cheap to someday pop up withing 3-5 hours from me.  Weren't
> >these things used for political analysis once?
> 
> No idea. CS research and CAD/CAM are the two niches I'm aware of.
> 
> Was Mathematica originally written on a lisp machine of some sort?

Err, I thought Mathematica was originally for Sun or Nextstep.  Macsyma
(now Maxima, a GPLed program) was originally written on a lisp machine
(with a port to Symbolics I believe).  Macsyma was first written at MIT,
and recieved government funding.  It later was taken up by a private
company and sold for what I'm told makes Mathematica look cheap.  Anyway,
Macsyma (the company) went bust, and so some people got the needed
permissions to release the 1982 pre Macsyma (company) version of
Macsyma to release as GPL.  And since the name Macsyma was taken, the
GPLed version was called Maxima.  It has recieved further development, and
is compiled with CMUCL.

Maxima is no where as easy to use a Mathematica.  Some tests (run by
people far smarter than me) say that Maxima is more powerfull that
Mathematica.  The gave both programs (plus some others) problems that were
really hard and judged the programs on speed and acuracy, and apparently
at least one of the problems couldn't be completed by Mathematica.

Maxima has no intrinsic graphing utilities.  It does have a least one
rather innovative front end (called Symaxx), and most front ends make it
integrate with Gnuplot.  In my own attempts to use Maxima, I never could
figure out how to assign a matrix to a variable, then use that variable to
call a function.  Sure, I could type something like det([[1, 2,3],
[4,5,6],[7,8,9]]) and it would work, but I wanted to be able to do A=[[1,
2,3], [4,5,6],[7,8,9]], B=det(A), print B, etc.  However, this was
probably due to being unable to find adequate documentation.

One other lisp thing of note.  Some histories of lisp say that it was
invented for AI.  Other histories say that the original funding was for a
programming language that could aid doing symbolic integrals and
derivitives.  Personally, the second seems a hair more likely to me.  We
are talking about the 50s after all.  The official history written by
McCarthy himself says both were initial goals.

BTW, there is some interesting stuff happening with XML and lisp that
people who like either might want to search out.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd