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Re: Dylan (DYnamic LANguage) -- what's the deal?
Mentifex <mentifex@my-deja.com> wrote in message
8mgjlr$6vq$1@nnrp1.deja.com">news:8mgjlr$6vq$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> On Sun.30.Jul.2000 I perused a paper by Peter Norvig and
> David Cohn called "Adaptive Software" at the URL
> http://www.norvig.com/adapaper-pcai.html on the Web.
>
> The authors seemed to make a wild and irresponsible claim
> that with Dylan, it was possible for a running program to
> grow and add new functionality on the fly, so to speak,
> that is, without stopping the program and re-coding it.
>
> Arthur T. Murray
> mentifex@scn.org
>
Arthur -
The capability you refer to is entirely standard for the Lisp family of
languges, of which Dylan is a member. Far from being exotic, it's a
capability
that's decades old and is shared by several other languages.
What puzzles me is that you've posted constantly (often on inappropriate
groups)
concerning AI for years, and yet you don't know such a basic fact about the
most common of all AI languages, Lisp. Even AI programmers who work in
Prolog
or C++ normally find it necessary to be able to read Lisp, so that they can
evaluate and
learn from their fellows' work.
Peter Norvig is one of the most valuable and talented members of both the AI
and computer language communities. You might want to keep
words like "wild and irresponsible" further away from his name - and indeed
anyone else's name, until you have real reason to use such terms. If you
want to learn more about AI, Lisp, or computer languages, then reading one
or more of Peter Norvig's books would be an excellent place to start.
Jonathan Coupe
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