I love lisp

[gusl]

I'm making progress on my system to play argumentation games. I'm currently obsessive.

Macros are great for meta-programming, but I wish you could also use unquoted code in them. Something like:

(defmacro which-variable (x)
"return a variable depending on the value of x"
(cond ((eq x 0) '*P*))
((eq x 1) '*Q*))))

I still haven't figured out the cheat to make a Lisp interpreter in one line. i.e. to evaluate a list as code.


Anyway, the only class I'm registered for now is "Approaches to argument/Rhetorical and dialectical analysis", which is probably too philosophy/law-oriented for me (i.e. not technical enough)

The logic of defeasible argumentation A course with slides online

I'm also visiting Set Theory and MDL Learning. The latter seems more interesting... I get annoyed by doing mathematics on paper (it's even worse when I'm reading).

Elementary Set theory, today:
Instructor- Prove that if f has an inverse, it is unique.
Me (silently)- but every function is unique!
... 15 seconds pass...
Me (out loud)- Ahh... you mean the inverse is unique!

I think too literally even for mathematicians. I wonder how exactly cognitive theories of autism could explain this difficulty to disengage from the most salient interpretation.

When I last checked, there were still no cognitive models of autism (or to be more precise, "cognitive architectures modeling autism")

Comments

Macros

[fare.livejournal.com]

Funny, I've started writing about macros and quasiquotation. That said, you can very well use unquoted code in macro, of course. Read "On Lisp" for a course on writing macros. That said, for complex computations, what you would do is define a lot of auxiliary functions in an (EVAL-WHEN ...), and the main macro would call the functions to do code transformation, instead of trying to replace the code piece-meal into new macro calls.

As for autism, see this Wired article http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/genius_pr.html or from Ming, http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/__show_article/_a000010-001472.htm