Re: Dylan in the news

[tjohnson@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Todd R Johnson)]

In article <19920528071615.2.YORK@TEX-AVERY.west.dialnet.ila.com> York@CHUCK-JONES.west.dialnet.ila.com (William M. York) writes:
>From the business section of the San Jose Mercury News, 5/27/92:
>
>"Newest Dylan sings in different language"
>
>Subtitle: "Dylan to serve as heart of Apple's PDAs"
>
>Dylan is a hybrid of two older programming languages, notably LISP,
>created about 20 years ago expressly to write artificial-intelligence
>programs.

	And what other language? It says "a hybrid of TWO..."

>  LISP has at its core something called an "inference engine"
>that helps programs make human-like decisions -- but at the cost of a
>superhuman appetite for computing power and memory.  

	I give up. Are they calling the LISP interpreter an inference
engine? If so, then BASIC also has an inference engine. Perhaps this
article is really referring to a rule-based system of some type. Is
that the other language?

>To make Dylan suitable for PDAs instead of the huge computers LISP
>prefers, Apple researchers added a feature called "garbage collection"
>that regularly clears out disused segments of a PDA's memory and frees
>the space for other uses.

	First, several years ago I ran MCL (Mac Common Lisp) on a 2
meg Mac Plus, hardly a powerhouse. Two years ago I developed a large
lisp program using MCL on an 5 meg SE/30.

Second, "garbage collection" is a standard feature of lisp and other
heap-based languages---it is not new. 

Now if only those Apple researchers would discover preemptive
multitasking, dynamic memory allocation, and dynamic memory access
Apple could bring the Mac OS into the 80's. :-)

	---Todd