RE: Lisp, the secret weapon.

From: Gavin Thomas Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Date: Sat Apr 28 2001 - 16:04:51 PDT


I wrote a distributed hypermedia system (with real P2P
before it was cool) with shared whiteboard, shared
history etc. which was *secure*, in 1992-1994.

The interaction with the system (networking, X,
etc.) was all written as extensions to a LISP engine. The messages
the system sent back and forth was LISP (which, if you switched
"()" for "<></>" looked a lot like XML).

It was probably one of the most interesting things I ever wrote...
I wrote the system (LISP interpreter, system libraries, about
40,000 lines of C++, most of it in the libraries!) in a month
because it was so *cool*.

There are some things in that system that still were really cool,
like the way system state propagated from node to node in a secure
manner... like the way that most of the network could go down, but
the history and state wouldn't be lost.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 29 2001 - 20:26:19 PDT