What about the speed of operation? The specification does not set any requirements for this, and so two different Lisp implementations which differ in that property can both be correct yet produce different output.
Even if it runs at one clock cycle per millenia, it would still theoretically be able to run any given program, and produce exactly the same output.
The time function is also external to the LISP implementation; it is a call to the OS, so the output that is printing the current time doesn’t count.
Given a program P consisting of a linear bit-pattern, that is fed into virtual machine L, and produces a linear bit-pattern B to a section of non-local memory location O.
During the runtime of P on L, the only interaction with non-local memory is writing B to O.
There is no bits passed from non-local memory to local memory.
For all L If and only if L is true to the specification then for any P there is only one possible B.
P is the lisp program source code, which does not read from stdin, keyboard drivers, web sockets or any similar source of external information.
L is a LISP (virtual) machine.
B is some form of data, such as text, binary data, images, etc.
O is some destination could be stdout, screen, speakers, etc.
Ah, ok, I find nothing to disagree with there. Looking back up the conversation, I see that I was responding to the word “behavior”. Specifically, bigjeff5 said:
In other words, the same Lisp code will result in slightly different behavior on a Mac than it would on a Linux machine.
To which you responded:
If Lisp behaves differently from the mathematical ideal on any machine, that means the machine is incapable of supplying said turing machine.
So it comes down to: does the “behaviour” of a Lisp implementation include anything besides the output? Which effectively comes down to what question we’re trying to answer about Lisp, or computation, or etc.
The original question was about whether a Lisp machine needs to include abstractions for the substrate it’s running on. The most direct answer is “No, because the specification doesn’t mention anything about the substrate.” More generally, if a program needs introspection it can do it with quine trickery, or more realistically just use a system call.
Bigjeff5 responded by pointing out that the choice of substrate can determine whether or not the Lisp implementation is useful to anybody. This is of course correct, but this is a separate issue from whether or not the Lisp abstraction needs to include anything about its own substrate; a Lisp can be fast or slow, useful or useless, regardless of whether or not its internal abstractions include a reference to or description of the device it is running on.
What about the speed of operation? The specification does not set any requirements for this, and so two different Lisp implementations which differ in that property can both be correct yet produce different output.
Even if it runs at one clock cycle per millenia, it would still theoretically be able to run any given program, and produce exactly the same output. The time function is also external to the LISP implementation; it is a call to the OS, so the output that is printing the current time doesn’t count.
I think we may have to taboo “output”, as the contention seems to be about what is included by that word.
Given a program P consisting of a linear bit-pattern, that is fed into virtual machine L, and produces a linear bit-pattern B to a section of non-local memory location O. During the runtime of P on L, the only interaction with non-local memory is writing B to O. There is no bits passed from non-local memory to local memory.
For all L If and only if L is true to the specification then for any P there is only one possible B.
P is the lisp program source code, which does not read from stdin, keyboard drivers, web sockets or any similar source of external information.
L is a LISP (virtual) machine.
B is some form of data, such as text, binary data, images, etc.
O is some destination could be stdout, screen, speakers, etc.
Ah, ok, I find nothing to disagree with there. Looking back up the conversation, I see that I was responding to the word “behavior”. Specifically, bigjeff5 said:
To which you responded:
So it comes down to: does the “behaviour” of a Lisp implementation include anything besides the output? Which effectively comes down to what question we’re trying to answer about Lisp, or computation, or etc.
The original question was about whether a Lisp machine needs to include abstractions for the substrate it’s running on. The most direct answer is “No, because the specification doesn’t mention anything about the substrate.” More generally, if a program needs introspection it can do it with quine trickery, or more realistically just use a system call.
Bigjeff5 responded by pointing out that the choice of substrate can determine whether or not the Lisp implementation is useful to anybody. This is of course correct, but this is a separate issue from whether or not the Lisp abstraction needs to include anything about its own substrate; a Lisp can be fast or slow, useful or useless, regardless of whether or not its internal abstractions include a reference to or description of the device it is running on.