[Ecls-list] Re: SPARC sun4m and ECL vs Portable-Aserve

[GP lisper]

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 18:07:08 +0200, <lisp at arrakis.es> wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-10-09 at 02:05 -0700, GP lisper wrote:
>>
>> Thanks again for ECL, I am always trying to work it into some code, if
>> only I had more W32 experience!
>
> Why W32?

What I generally wish to accomplish is adding a DLL to a program (that
is my understanding, I actually don't have a clue about this part) in
order to patch in ECL and be able to tinker with the W32 program.

For instance, I was just thinking about 'adjusting' a program by being
able to feed into it's standard input based on events in the std
output.  Consider a common W32 IRC program and a desire to add in
'mwe-cambridge-permute.el' to std out somewhere in the keyboard dll
code (before it gets wrapped into IRC packets).  The fun part is no
sourcecode, which means learning some of the disassembler tools.

I have a lot of interest in A.I. programs, but no interest in writing
a huge framework to do something interesting that can then be plugged
into experimental AI programs.  The easiest way in (for me) is to
hijack something already written.  I've seen the technique in action a
couple years ago, in C code which ran a javascript interpreter.  The
AI stuff wasn't too bad, nor was it very good.  I know that Common
Lisp would do better.

Alas, I am not a trained programmer, just a hacker that learned some
programming in order to accomplish a few tasks (lots of perl sysadmin
scripts, lots of Fortran physics code, some Z80 assembler interrupt
driven I/O interface to PL/1 and ZCPR3 hacking).  In fact that ZCPR3
hack was to create the unix 'make' ability in CP/M (ZCPR3) by
hijacking std out into a ring buffer and analyzing the content to see
if the next step in the 'Makefile' should take place, and then
injecting that step into std in.  It was a very useful tool back in
those days. CP/M had a dispatch table of jump vectors for 'std I/O',
so re-routing was easy.  It is my understanding that DLLs work
somewhat like that dispatch table.  I got into linux back in the
beginning, kernel 1.0.9 timeframe, so modern W32 DLL coding is a
mystery.  The above is essentially the reason I'm always interested in
ECL.


In Linux, I just use the source.

-- 
If you don't like LOOP, how do you feel about DOLIST ?