Lisp

“ KEY WORDS (Continue on reverse side if necessary and identify by block number) compiler optimization tail-recursion code generation lambda calculus LISP lexical scoping macros continuations 18. ABSTRACT (Continue on reverse side if necessary and identify by block number) We have developed a compiler for the lexically-scoped dialect of LISP known as SCHEME. The compiler knows relatively little about specific data manipulation primitives such as arithmetic operators, but concentrates on general issues of environment and contral. ”

“ Led by AI Lab arch-hacker Richard Greenblatt, AI Lab programmers during the 1970s built up an entire Lisp-based operating system, dubbed the Lisp Machine operating system. By 1980, the Lisp Machine project had generated two commercial spin-offs. Symbolics was headed by Russell Noftsker, a former AI Lab administrator. ”

“ The use of the print names amounts to tagging each marker or structure with a type and a creation timestamp. A LISP-like language encourages the inclusion of such information.) (GENTEMP 'NODE) => NODE-2534 A list of all generated symbols is maintained in *GENTEMPLISTL GENFLUSH can be called to excise all generated symbols from the MacLISP obarray; this is periodically necessary when compiling a large file so that unneeded symbols may be garbage-collected. ”

“ At twelve or fifteen months infants begin to lisp. A is the vowel which they articulate with most ease, as it requires nothing more than the opening of the lips, and forcing out the breath. E requires that the tongue should be raised as the lips are opened; and is therefore pronounced with a degree of more trouble. I is attended with greater difficulty, as in the articulation of the vowel the tongue is elevated still more, and made to approach the teeth of the upper jaw. In the pronunciation of O, the tongue must be lowered, and the lips contracted ”

“ In the fourth section we will give a general discussion of the issues facing an implementor of an interpreter for a language based on lambda calculus. Finally, we will present a completely annotated interpreter for SCHEME, written in MacLISP [Moon] [4] , to acquaint programmers with the tricks of the trade of implementing non-recursive control structures in a recursive language like LISP.
This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ”

“ See {time T} (also {since time T equals minus infinity}) . 3. [techspeak] In transaction-processing circles, an abbreviation for the noun `transaction'. 4. [Purdue] Alternate spelling of {tee}. 5. A dialect of {LISP} developed at Yale. (There is an intended allusion to NIL, "New Implementation of Lisp", another dialect of Lisp developed for the {VAX})
:tail recursion: /n./ If you aren't sick of it already, see {tail recursion}.
:talk mode: /n./ A feature supported by Unix, ITS, and some other OSes that allows two or more logged-in users to set up a real-time on-line conversation. ”

“ Sigismund is of the opinion that this first lisping, or babbling, consists in the production of syllables with only two sounds, of which the consonant is most often the first; that the first consonants distinctly pronounced are labials; that the lips, brought into activity by sucking, are the first organs of articulation ”

“ It maybe remarked, that the quantity of a syllable is short when the accent is on a consonant; as, art ́, bon ́net, hun ́ger. The hyphen (-) , placed over a syllable, denotes that it is long: n=áture. The breve (~) over a syllable, denotes that it is short; as, d~etr=áct."—Chandler's Common School Gram., p. 189. This scheme of quantity is truly remarkable for its absurdity and confusion. What becomes of the elongating power of e, without accent or emphasis, as in jun ́cate, pal ́ate, prel ́ate? Who does not know that such syllables as "at, bat, and cur" are often long in poetry? ”

“ For not only have the effective letters of our alphabet a variety of meanings, but they are used in such a capricious manner, so utterly disregardful of all analogy—all expectation, that it is, as we have seen, totally impossible for even a practised English reader to guess, with any approach to certainty, what may be meant for the pronunciation of any word which he has not previously seen, or how to write any word which he has only heard, and never seen written. ”

“ The current statement that the syllable -ed, rather than the letter -d, is the sign of the præterite tense, is true only in regard to the written language. In stabbed, moved, bragged, whizzed, judged, filled, slurred, slammed, shunned, barred, strewed, the e is a point of spelling only. In language, except in declamation, there is no second vowel sound. The -d comes in immediate contact with the final letter of the original word, and the number of syllables remains the same as it was before. ”

“ We recognize in this that music is not confined within the bounds of any language and we almost imagine that its spirit and being must actually dwell in the general modern idioms and thus impart to them the distinctive characteristics of the old languages. For Liszt also—and now we come to our subject—wrote in French and only in French, and yet we can say that he has enriched, beautified and extended the German language, for he wrote our modern speech from the inner spirit, because he wrote from the spirit of music, which above all belongs to us. ”

“ In modern writing the division of syllables where required, as at the end of a line, is made to follow the etymology rather than the sound; thus it is usual to divide can-u ‘to sing’ so, can being the stem and u the ending, instead of ca-nu, which is the true syllabic division. In the case of more than one written consonant the division is usually made to follow the sound; thus, can-nu ‘to whiten’, plen-tyn ‘a child’, the etymological division being cann-u, plent-yn. Ml. scribes divided a word anywhere, even in the middle of a digraph. ”

“ If he will appeal to Professor Lepsius, he will hear how, 494 even at that time, I had translated for him the chapters of the Prâtiśâkhyas, which explain the true structure of a physiological alphabet, and ascribe the distinction between k and g to the absence and presence of voice. I purposely avoided these new terms, because I doubted, and I still doubt, whether we should gain much by their adoption. I do not exactly share the misgivings that a surd mute might be mistaken for a deaf and dumb letter, but I think the name is awkward. ”

“ Also, special German characters like U with an umlaut, and French characters like a's and e's with various markings above them were ignored, replaced with their closet single-letter equivalents. U with an umlaut is U, A with a caret above it is A, and so on. Words altered include Gotze, Tonkunstler, Gluck, Handel and Bulow, among others.
In addition, the English spellings of words like "honour," "colour," "humour" and "theatre" were changed into American equivalents like "honor," "color," "humor" and "theater." ”

“ Correct pronunciation depends upon three things, correct sounding of the letters, correct division into syllables, and correct placing of the accent.
A syllable is the smallest separately articulated, or pronounced, element in speech, or one of the parts into which speech is broken. It consists of a vowel alone or accompanied by one or more consonants and separated by them, or by a pause, from a preceding or following vowel. This division of words into syllables is indicated in dictionaries by the use of the hyphen thus: sub-trac-tion, co-or-din-ate. ”

“ Littré noticed how intimately pronunciation was allied to spelling. They are two forces, he says, which react continually upon each other. When there is no extensive teaching of grammar, and the language is learned orally rather than by the eye, then pronunciation modifies spelling, which follows it closely. When, on the contrary, books play a large part in teaching the mother tongue, spelling influences pronunciation: the tendency is to pronounce all the letters, and traditional pronunciation succumbs in many places to the visible symbols. ”

“ The Old English long vowels have shifted their phonetic values with such uniform regularity that it is possible in almost every case to infer the Modern English sound; but our spelling is so chaotic that while the student may infer the modern sound, he cannot always infer the modern symbol representing the sound.
(2) Analogy. 24.
But more important than vowel shifting is the great law of Analogy, for Analogy shapes not only words but constructions. It belongs, therefore, to 24 Etymology and to Syntax, since it influences both form and function. ”

“ For the scientific philologist, no less than for the practical teacher, a return to the phonetic spelling of our English language is of the highest importance. What the philologist wishes to know is not how words are spelt, but how they are pronounced, and this end can be obtained only by means of an alphabet in which all the chief sounds of the language are represented, and each character represents but one sound. ”

“ The strict attention paid to the rudiments of the English tongue, in a school apparently classical, might to some appear excessive; and I must own that, having been taught under Mrs. Jackson to spell quite as correctly as I spell now, I was not a little surprised when I was requested to learn a column of three syllables in an English spelling-book. Indeed, I was dissatisfied with the proceeding, and had the audacity to ask Dr. Saunders whether we were not going to do any Latin that afternoon. ”

“ Most amazing caricature of a written language! ⸮And what is the result? No one spells correctly; many spell wretchedly; but no one is at all times certain of the proper mode of spelling any given word. For there is not even method in this madness. Words of precisely the same sound are spelt in the most different manners—words of different sounds are spelt in the same manner. Of these two cases, the following examples occur to us immediately. We give the phonetic representative of the sound, followed by =, and the heterotypic spellings ”

“ In the formation of syllables, I consider that the sound of breath arrested belongs to the first, and the sound of breath escaping to the second syllable; that each sound being expressed by a separate sign, the word happy is divided thus, haπ-πy; and that such is the case with all consonants between two syllables. The whole consonant belongs neither to one syllable nor the other. Half of it belongs to each. The reduplication of the p in happy, the t in pitted, &c, is a mere point of spelling, of which more will be said in the chapter on orthography. ”

“ In no case is an unaccented syllable or even a syllable with a secondary accent allowed to take part in the alliteration. This fact, that secondarily accented syllables are debarred from alliterating, is another proof that it is better to look on them as belonging to the thesis rather than to the arsis of the verse.
The Principles of Alliteration.
§ 33. Quality of the Alliteration. It is an all but invariable rule that the correspondence of sounds must be exact and not merely approximate. A g must alliterate to a g, not to a c, a d to a d, not to a t, and so on. ”

“ To this author, as it would seem, we owe the invention of that absurd doctrine, since copied into a great multitude of our English grammars, that the accent on a syllable of two or more letters, belongs, not to the whole of it, but only to some one letter; and that according to the character of this letter, as vowel or consonant, the same stress serves to lengthen or shorten the syllable's quantity! Of this matter, he speaks thus: "The great distinction of our accent depends upon its seat ”

“ Their influence reaches far beyond the proper sphere of phonetics and invades that of morphology, as we shall see. A drift that begins as a slight phonetic readjustment or unsettlement may in the course of millennia bring about the most profound structural changes. The mere fact, for instance, that there is a growing tendency to throw the stress automatically on the first syllable of a word may eventually change the fundamental type of the language, reducing its final syllables to zero and driving it to the use of more and more analytical or symbolic [149] methods. ”

“ The alterations he proposed and carried out in his published works tended in certain ways toward formal regularity; but they also tended to make the divergence between the spelling and the pronunciation [Pg 246] still wider. For instance, the so-called regular verb in our tongue adds ed to form the preterite. Ritson made the general rule universal. He appended the termination also to verbs ending in e. Accordingly the past tense, for illustration, of love, oblige, and surprise appeared as loveed, obligeed, and surpriseed. ”

“ I have paid especial attention to the suffixes required by Middle-English grammar, to the scansion, and to the pronunciation; and I suppose that this is the first complete edition in which the spelling has been tested by phonetic considerations. With a view to making the spelling a little clearer and more consistent, I have ventured to adopt certain methods which I here explain.
In certain words of variable spelling in E., such as whan or whanne, than or thanne, I have adopted that form which the scansion requires; but the MS. is usually right. ”

“ No regard need be paid to orthographic or correct spelling, only such words as may be considered indispensably necessary to give the sound of the word, must be expressed. As in all phonographic systems, each word expressed by consonants, must be guessed by supplying vowels, or from its position in the context. The reader, after a little practice, will find no difficulty in making out the words expressed by their consonants, as bsk, bbl, bkm, drk, meaning bask or busk, became or become, dark or dirk. ”

“ The fact however remains, that in the process [51] of the development of primitive systems of writing, before the use of an alphabet, the influence of language structure upon the systems of writing is an important factor in the case.
A curious phenomenon in the history of human speech is the preference shown by certain families of language for special combinations of vowels and consonants. The simplest combination is of a single vowel with a preceding consonant in the formation of syllables. ”