q-lang-users — general discussion, questions, suggestions, etc.

Re: [q-lang-users] ANN: SuSE 10.1 packages available

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

/me wrote:
> I've tested these quite thoroughly, and so far everything seems to work
> o.k. The only problem I noticed is that neither the GLUT teapot nor
> NURBS work with the OpenGL software renderer, but that's apparently a
> glitch in the Mesa version distributed with SuSE 10.1 (OpenGL demo
> programs written in C exhibit the same behaviour).

I just tested the examples again after installing the NVIDIA driver, and
both the teapot and NURBS work just fine with hardware 3D acceleration.
So it's indeed an issue with the software renderer.

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag

[q-lang-users] New Windows build

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Hi,

I just noticed that the ImageMagick version 6.2.6-x-Q16 used by the most
recent build of the Qpad package doesn't seem to be available any more.
Therefore I've uploaded a new build which now links against the most
recent ImageMagick version, 6.2.9-3-Q16, which is also available from
SourceForge, so it shouldn't just disappear from the net:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/imagemagick/ImageMagick-6.2.9-3-Q16-windows-dll.exe?download

The new Qpad package is available here:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/q-lang/Qpad-7.4.msi?download

If you already have a working Qpad installation, or if you don't use Q's
magick module, there is no need to upgrade. You only need to install the
new package if you want to use the magick module with the most recent
Windows version of ImageMagick.

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag

[q-lang-users] ANN: SuSE 10.1 packages available

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Hi,

SuSE 10.1 packages are now available from the Download page, and the
Faust packages have been updated to release 0.9.8. I also patched up the
PortAudio packages (make sure you get v19-2) so that they work with Jack
0.100.

I've tested these quite thoroughly, and so far everything seems to work
o.k. The only problem I noticed is that neither the GLUT teapot nor
NURBS work with the OpenGL software renderer, but that's apparently a
glitch in the Mesa version distributed with SuSE 10.1 (OpenGL demo
programs written in C exhibit the same behaviour). If anyone has an idea
how to fix that please let me know.

As usual, all new packages can be found on
http://q-lang.sf.net/download.html

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag

Re: [q-lang-users] [cowan: Chicken Scheme to Q interface almost ready for beta]

[John C. <co...@cc...>]

Albert Graef scripsit:

> I'd say that's a bad idea, because it's inconsistent (at least from Q's 
> POV) and gives the Chicken programmer a very wrong idea about how these 
> operators behave in Q. Also, you'd have to handle user-defined 
> operators, too. Therefore I'd favour the idea of having a separate macro 
> to handle these cases.

Well, I'll leave it out of the first release and concentrate on documenting
what I've got.  I should also have added that due to limitations in
Chicken's foreign-function interface, only fixnums (in the range of 2^30)
and floats can pass through.  Larger integral values will be
converted to floats before Chicken sees them, and will remain so
when passed back to Q.

When I can get support for bignums, adding rational and complex
numbers should be no problem.

-- 
We pledge allegiance to the penguin             John Cowan
and to the intellectual property regime         co...@cc...
for which he stands, one world under            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Linux, with free music and open source
software for all.               --Julian Dibbell on Brazil, edited

Re: [q-lang-users] [cowan: Chicken Scheme to Q interface almost ready for beta]

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

John Cowan wrote:
> I'm really, really close to releasing the beta version of my egg for
> Chicken Scheme, which provides Chicken programmers with convenient access
> to the Q interpreter.

Hey, that's great! I'm currently downloading Chicken s.t. it's ready to 
go when you release your Q egg...

> Nevertheless, this *is* surprising, and means that to represent "1+2+3"
> as an S-expression one must write nested q:call lists.

Yes, but that's to be expected. In difference to Lisp, Q's (+) is *not* 
variadic. If this is really too much hassle, you could maybe add 
something like a q:foldl/q:foldr macro which does the necessary 
expansion or translates to a q:call of Q's foldl1/foldr1.

> I thought of
> treating applications where the second element is an operator specially,

I'd say that's a bad idea, because it's inconsistent (at least from Q's 
POV) and gives the Chicken programmer a very wrong idea about how these 
operators behave in Q. Also, you'd have to handle user-defined 
operators, too. Therefore I'd favour the idea of having a separate macro 
to handle these cases.

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag

[q-lang-users] [cowan: Chicken Scheme to Q interface almost ready for beta]

[John C. <co...@cc...>]

I'm really, really close to releasing the beta version of my egg for
Chicken Scheme, which provides Chicken programmers with convenient access
to the Q interpreter.  There are only four points left:

1) Some code has not yet been fully tested.

2) I have to write some HTML documentation.

2) Improper tuples like "(1,2|3)" aren't yet being converted from
S-expressions to Q binary representation.  I expect they will be rare in
Q expressions as opposed to rules: there is no S-expression representation
of rules.

3) There is a conflict of expectations between Scheme and Q programmers
around applications with multiple arguments.  The Q application "f x"
is written in S-expression form as (q:call f x); the "q:call" symbol
marks it as an application rather than a list.  (There are good reasons
for not using a quote on the Scheme side.)

Since Q is currying but Scheme is not, I allow "f x y" to be written as
(q:call f x y) on the Scheme side, and that is treated as if it were
(q:call (q:call f x) y).  In particular, (q:call + 1 2) will properly
reduce to 3.

The difficulty arises when a binary operation is given more than two
arguments.  While testing, I tried normalizing (q:call + 1 2 3) and got
back the surprising result (q:call 3 3).  At first I thought there was
a bug, but then I realized that the equivalent form was (q:call (q:call
(q:call + 1) 2) 3), or in Q notation "(+) 1 2 3", which in fact means
"((+) 1 2) 3" or simply "(1 + 2) 3", which indeed reduces to "3 3".

Nevertheless, this *is* surprising, and means that to represent "1+2+3"
as an S-expression one must write nested q:call lists.  I thought of
treating applications where the second element is an operator specially,
but that would make it impossible to write the equivalent of "(1 + 2) 3"
should one wish to do so.

I'm very much open to suggestions on this one.  Should I leave
things alone?  Should I introduce another q:xxx flag to mark calls of
binary operators (required only if there are more than two arguments)?
Or something else?  If the last, what?

-- 
But the next day there came no dawn,            John Cowan
and the Grey Company passed on into the         co...@cc...
darkness of the Storm of Mordor and were        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
lost to mortal sight; but the Dead
followed them.          --"The Passing of the Grey Company"

Re: [q-lang-users] ANN: Q 7.4, Q Yacc/Lex 0.9

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

John Cowan wrote:
> Builds and runs successfully on Cygwin.

Nice, thanks for the report.

Did anyone try the new Q Yacc/Lex yet? Q Yacc is still rather slow, so 
if anyone has an idea on how to further speed up the Q implementation of 
the LALR algorithm then please let me know. The generated parsers and 
scanners should be fast enough for practical purposes now, as I've 
reimplemented the internals of both yyparse and yylex in C. (They're 
still slower than pure C, as they call back into Q for the actions, but 
there's no way around that.)

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag

Re: [q-lang-users] ANN: Q 7.4, Q Yacc/Lex 0.9

[John C. <co...@cc...>]

Albert Graef scripsit:

> I've just uploaded Q 7.4, which fixes a memory allocation bug in the 
> compiler. Also now available: Q Yacc/Lex 0.9 with more speed 
> improvements and bugfixes (a fairly complete Q grammar is now also 
> included in this package).

Builds and runs successfully on Cygwin.

-- 
Cash registers don't really add and subtract;           John Cowan
        they only grind their gears.                    co...@cc...
But then they don't really grind their gears, either;   
        they only obey the laws of physics.  --Unknown

[q-lang-users] ANN: Q 7.4, Q Yacc/Lex 0.9

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Hi,

I've just uploaded Q 7.4, which fixes a memory allocation bug in the 
compiler. Also now available: Q Yacc/Lex 0.9 with more speed 
improvements and bugfixes (a fairly complete Q grammar is now also 
included in this package).

The binary Q packages now also include the latest Q Yacc/Lex. As usual, 
all the good stuff is available from the Download page at 
http://q-lang.sf.net.

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag

Re: [q-lang-users] Just starting with Q

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Burton Samograd wrote:
> I know about SC, but for some reason I've avoided it since I found it
> years ago, probably because I found the sytax very non-familiar at the
> time.

Yes, SC-Lang needs some time to get used to it, but it has such a great 
realtime sound+synth engine underneath. Good sound, and very low 
latency. That's what I mostly use, and it can be controlled quite 
conveniently from Q via OSC. I also started thinking about a Q API for 
the synth definitions. When that is finished, together with the 
sequencer interface I'm working on, then you will be able to just use Q 
as the SC language client instead of SC-Lang.

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag

[q-lang-users] Start earning the salary you deserve by obtaining the proper credentials!

[<q....@ae...>]

<div align="left"><b><font size="5"> Want the degree but can’t find the time?</font></b><BR>
  <BR>
  WHAT A GREAT IDEA!<BR>
  We provide a concept that will allow anyone with sufficient work experience 
  to obtain a fully verifiable University Degree.<BR>
  Bachelors, Masters or even a Doctorate.<BR>
  Think of it, within four to six weeks, you too could be a college graduate.<BR>
  Many people share the same frustration, they are all doing the work of the person 
  that has the degree and the person that has the degree is getting all the money.<BR>
  Don’t you think that it is time you were paid fair compensation for the level 
  of work you are already doing?<BR>
  This is your chance to finally make the right move and receive your due benefits.<BR>
  If you are like most people, you are more than qualified with your experience, 
  but are lacking that prestigious piece of paper known as a diploma that is often 
  th
e passport to success.<BR>
  <b>CALL US TODAY AND GIVE YOUR WORK<BR>
  EXPERIENCE THE CHANCE TO EARN YOU<BR>
  THE HIGHER COMPENSATION YOU DESERVE!</b><BR>
  <font color="#FF0033" size="5">CALL NOW:</font><font color="#FF0033" size="7"><BR>
  <b>1-815-828-2222</b></font><BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
  <BR>
   Ive left a letter 
telling your aunt and uncle not to worry -</div>

[q-lang-users] **Message you sent blocked by our bulk email filter**

[MAILER-DAEMON <>]

WW91ciBtZXNzYWdlIHRvOiBwendpZWJlbEBmbGludHNjaG9vbHMub3JnCndhcyBibG9ja2VkIGJ5
IG91ciBTcGFtIEZpcmV3YWxsLiBUaGUgZW1haWwgeW91IHNlbnQgd2l0aCB0aGUgZm9sbG93aW5n
IHN1YmplY3QgaGFzIE5PVCBCRUVOIERFTElWRVJFRDoKClN1YmplY3Q6IFN0YXJ0IGVhcm5pbmcg
dGhlIHNhbGFyeSB5b3UgZGVzZXJ2ZSBieSBvYnRhaW5pbmcgdGhlIHByb3BlciBjcmVkZW50aWFs
cyEKCgoKKioqIFNjYW5uZWQgYnkgR2VuTkVUIEFWMTAgR2F0ZXdheSBPdXQgKioqCg==

[q-lang-users] ! tynan butterfat

[Shultz <boo...@st...>]

<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<DIV><img src="cid:65DHULV5F5JZZRD42TPM"></DIV>
<DIV>Moreover,  he may have sent it away by now - if ever there were such arolled  it out sonorously -'do not trouble our heads with doctrine. Wesoldier going south on leave; and they all laughed. 'Will it travel toand  the  lama  strode  away, leaving Kim at the edge of the cloister.power  was almost exactly that of his own pair, which he slid into theBuddhist  stupas  and viharas of the North Country and now, dug up andlama,  who had mechanically followed Kim to the platform. He bowed his'Hear!'  said  the lama, shifting the rosary to his hand. 'Hear: for Ihouse?' he said in very fair Urdu. 'The Ajaib-Gher, the Wonder House!'all  sorts  of  people to read them on the road. When, in Mahbub's ownwith  her  bundles,  and it was on her that Kim kept his watchful eye.by the promise. 'Is he not quite mad?' said Kim, coming forward to theknew  the  talc was to win her approval. 'Alas!' said the cultivator'sthe  bullying, red-bearded horsedealer whose caravans ploughed throughone  attains  freedom  from  the  Wheel  of Things,' the lama went on,arose.  'And  whom  didst  thou  worship  within?'  said  Kim affably,</DIV>
<DIV>crandall barbados amidst condescend</DIV>
</BODY></HTML>

Re: [q-lang-users] Just starting with Q

[Burton S. <kr...@gm...>]

On 8/25/06, Albert Graef <Dr....@t-...> wrote:
> Burton Samograd wrote:
> > Music is one of the forms of art that I do that is getting the most
> > attention lately
>
> The nickname kruhft rings a bell, but I don't recall whether I saw it in
> a music context or maybe on LtU... I'll have a look, thanks for the pointer.

I do post on LtU from time to time when I know enough about something
to actually have something to say, but my schooling was in Computer
Engineering and my work experience was video eames (a lot of 8 bit
assembly on the Gameboy and lot low level C coding) so my vocabulary
is a bit lacking when it comes to high level language topics.  My
study of computational linguistics has been an obsessive hobby for the
past years (I like to say my own version of self directed grad
school), but I think I've got a lot of the bases covered from what
I've found, read, and studied over the years.

> Regarding the audio stuff, one project that I'm still working on is an
> improved interface to Faust and SuperCollider, which (1) handles all the
> grunt work of loading Faust DSP plugins into SuperCollider and (2)
> provides a high-level control interface similar to SuperCollider's own,
> but written 100% in Q. I hope that I can still finish this before ICMC.
> The current interfaces to Faust and SuperCollider in the Q-Faust and
> Q-Synth packages are already quite usable, however, and they should let
> you do pretty much any high-fidelity, low-latency, realtime audio
> processing that you want (provided you have enough CPU power).

I know about SC, but for some reason I've avoided it since I found it
years ago, probably because I found the sytax very non-familiar at the
time.  I've used a number of other MIDI/DSP langugage system like
KeyKit, PD, Chuck and Common Lisp Music for my works in the past and I
read the docs for Faust and it looks pretty useful (plus there's
builtin support for it in Audacity, which is a pretty nice audio
editor that I recently added to my toolset), so I should probably take
another look at SC and see if I can mentallly translate it bettter now
that I have some more experience with alternate langages.

--
burton samograd                                                kr...@gm...
kruhft.boldlygoingnowhere.org              www.myspace.com/kruhft

[q-lang-users] a little question

[Rob H. <hub...@gm...>]

Hello Fabian,

As you seem to have noticed, the rule
     add [X|Xs] = X+add Xs;
does not work for the list []. This is because [] does not match the
pattern [X|Xs]. The pattern [X|Xs] is only matched by non-empty lists.
Q has not been told what to do with "add []".

Your modification fails to solve the problem for a similar reason.

If you tell Q what to do with the following rule
    add [] = 0;
then all will be well.

Alternatively, if you're not happy with defining add on the empty
list, you could do this:
    add [X] = X;
    add [X|Xs] = X+add Xs;

Rob.

On 25/08/06, Fabian Boucsein <kan...@we...> wrote:
> hello,
>
> from the q manual i tried the following example:
>
> add [X|Xs] = X+add Xs;
>
> then i tried this to test the function:
>
> ==> add [1, 2, 3, 4]
> 1+(2+(3+(4+add [])))
>
> what i want to know is, how can i change this function to get
> back a result? i tried the following:
>
> add [X|Xs] = X+add Xs if Xs <> [];
>
> ==> add [1, 2, 3, 4]
> 1+(2+(3+add [4]))
>
> which is still not the result i want. by the way i am using q 7.3
> maybe there is someone who can help me.
>
> greetings,
>
> fabian

Re: [q-lang-users] Just starting with Q

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Burton Samograd wrote:
> Music is one of the forms of art that I do that is getting the most
> attention lately

The nickname kruhft rings a bell, but I don't recall whether I saw it in 
a music context or maybe on LtU... I'll have a look, thanks for the pointer.

Regarding the audio stuff, one project that I'm still working on is an 
improved interface to Faust and SuperCollider, which (1) handles all the 
grunt work of loading Faust DSP plugins into SuperCollider and (2) 
provides a high-level control interface similar to SuperCollider's own, 
but written 100% in Q. I hope that I can still finish this before ICMC. 
The current interfaces to Faust and SuperCollider in the Q-Faust and 
Q-Synth packages are already quite usable, however, and they should let 
you do pretty much any high-fidelity, low-latency, realtime audio 
processing that you want (provided you have enough CPU power).

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag

[q-lang-users] a little question

[Fabian B. <kan...@we...>]

hello,

from the q manual i tried the following example:

add [X|Xs] = X+add Xs;

then i tried this to test the function:

==> add [1, 2, 3, 4]
1+(2+(3+(4+add [])))

what i want to know is, how can i change this function to get
back a result? i tried the following:

add [X|Xs] = X+add Xs if Xs <> [];

==> add [1, 2, 3, 4]
1+(2+(3+add [4]))

which is still not the result i want. by the way i am using q 7.3
maybe there is someone who can help me.

greetings,

fabian

Re: [q-lang-users] Just starting with Q

[Burton S. <kr...@gm...>]

On 8/24/06, Albert Graef <Dr....@t-...> wrote:
> Burton Samograd wrote:
> > Thanks for the very informative response to my newbie problems :)
>
> No problem. In fact those newbie questions are valuable input for the
> book about Q that I'm writing. I really have to add a "common pitfalls"
> chapter to the book where I describe the usual suspects and how to deal
> with them, and it's nice to have a ml archive which I can harvest for
> that. :) So keep the newbie questions coming.

Ok then, I shall ask without worry :)

> > 3 shows this week, work and remix contests
>
> Are you a musician? Q has quite a bit of stuff to offer there. Together
> with two colleagues, I'll be giving a talk on some of these interfaces
> at ICMC 2006 in New Orleans.

Music is one of the forms of art that I do that is getting the most
attention lately, although I also do visual art, writing, and whatever
else to keep myself busy.  The easiest way to hear my music is through
MySpace (see below in my signature), which I update pretty regularly
with a rotation of songs, and if you google me (kruhft or burton
samograd) you can find more of my music scattered about the 'net, and
if you don't have time for that, I could just send you some links off
list where you can download it from me since you're helping me out
with learning Q :)

One of the reasons I'm learning Q is because of the work you put in
integrating the audio/image libraries that are included.  I've worked
with many different types of audio programing sytems, and they are all
very capable, but I'm very much into 'interactive' and exploratory
programming and most styems really lack any sort of suitable shell
interface, which Q very capable provides and in a novel and very
useful way.  I've also been studying high level programming languages
for the past five years or so and would say that I know the current
state of the art feature set pretty well and 'know what I want from a
language' and you hit the nail on the head with Q, at least from what
I've read in the manual and the papers you've provided.

Basically, it looks like I've found exactly what I've been looking
for, so now I better put in the time to learn it :)

> > so I'm glad that one finally exists that isn't
> > putting kid gloves on me (Python), or concrete shoes (Haskell) and
> > let's one 'hack' like you're supposed to :D
>
> Yes, Q's certainly intended as a hacker's tool, in Paul Graham's sense.
> I love hacking away on problems, developing stuff from the bottom up,
> and IMHO Q supports that style fairly well.

Yes, hacker in the original, Lispy, working with data and code in a
natural sense sort of way, which is the way that my style went after
breaking the shackles of industrial programming (aka corporate and
production).  I write code to get the computer to do things for me,
not programs per se, and a combo shell/high level langauge is going to
open up new things that bash never could, and C was too tedious for
(even with the meta programming system that I came up with).

Ok, back to hacking so I can screw up and ask some more questions :)

-- 
burton samograd                                                kr...@gm...
kruhft.boldlygoingnowhere.org              www.myspace.com/kruhft

Re: [q-lang-users] Just starting with Q

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Burton Samograd wrote:
> Thanks for the very informative response to my newbie problems :)

No problem. In fact those newbie questions are valuable input for the 
book about Q that I'm writing. I really have to add a "common pitfalls" 
chapter to the book where I describe the usual suspects and how to deal 
with them, and it's nice to have a ml archive which I can harvest for 
that. :) So keep the newbie questions coming...

> 3 shows this week, work and remix contests

Are you a musician? Q has quite a bit of stuff to offer there. Together 
with two colleagues, I'll be giving a talk on some of these interfaces 
at ICMC 2006 in New Orleans.

> so I'm glad that one finally exists that isn't
> putting kid gloves on me (Python), or concrete shoes (Haskell) and
> let's one 'hack' like you're supposed to :D

Yes, Q's certainly intended as a hacker's tool, in Paul Graham's sense. 
I love hacking away on problems, developing stuff from the bottom up, 
and IMHO Q supports that style fairly well.

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag

Re: [q-lang-users] Just starting with Q

[Burton S. <kr...@gm...>]

Hi Albert,

Thanks for the very informative response to my newbie problems :)
I'll be running with -w from now on, and will try not to rush my code
so as to avoid silly typos (3 shows this week, work and remix contests
to enter had me a bit short of time for my study of a new programming
language, but I try and squeeze it in whenever I can find the time and
energy, if only because I think Q is really fascinating and could be a
very important part of my artistic arsenal in the future).

One of the major thing attracting me to Q is the fact that it's "a
very sharp knife" (which I can see from the design), and I know it
will take some experience and practice before I can do some major
surgery ;-)  One of the major issues I have with current languages is
lack of expressiveness, so I'm glad that one finally exists that isn't
putting kid gloves on me (Python), or concrete shoes (Haskell) and
let's one 'hack' like you're supposed to :D (after the initial
learning curve that is)

I appreciate your help very much with these issues; nothing like
learning the language from the designer (and one that saved me 10
years of work by creating the language that I *was* designing until I
found Q).

-- 
burton samograd                                                kr...@gm...
kruhft.boldlygoingnowhere.org              www.myspace.com/kruhft

Re: [q-lang-users] Just starting with Q

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Hi Burton,

thanks for the log, that cleared things up quite a bit. Looks like the 
computations are going ok now -- no more unevaluated cat applications, 
so I assume that these were actually due to the bug in 7.1/7.2 I 
mentioned, which is now fixed. But there are various bugs in your script 
which cause the behaviour that you see with --no-prelude. The bugs you 
were bitten by are not unusual, and I have some advice on how to avoid 
these pitfalls.

Specifically, it might be a good idea to run your scripts with -w which 
warns you about function symbols that are used but neither defined 
(occurring on the lhs of an equation) nor explicitly declared anywhere. 
(There's also --pedantic a.k.a. -w2 which warns you about all function 
and free variable symbols which are not explicitly declared, but that's 
rather awkward since it forces you to declare each and every symbol.) I 
have my Emacs Q mode configured to always run the interpreter with -w, 
and of course you can also do the same on the command line with an alias.

Running your script with --no-prelude -w gives:

Warning cat, line 10: undeclared function symbol `issym'
Warning cat, line 10: undeclared function symbol `prints'
Warning cat, line 10: undeclared function symbol `putc'
Warning cat, line 10: undeclared function symbol `fgetc'

(The warnings are printed at the end of a script, that's why you always 
see line 10 up there. With --pedantic you get the warnings on the spot, 
for each first occurrence of an undeclared symbol.)

Ok, so issym and prints aren't defined anywhere, but these are not the 
culprits here. But putc/fgetc are not defined either and this breaks 
your script with --no-prelude. These functions come from clib.q, and 
actually they are just aliases for writec/freadc, so replacing these for 
putc/fgetc will make the cat function work as intended, even with 
--no-prelude.

BTW, this kind of bugs is rather symptomatic of Q, because function 
symbols are declared implicitly, and Q is perfectly happy with 
applications of undefined or partially defined functions; they're just 
normal forms. This is actually an essential feature of Q as a term 
rewriting language. In a more conventional language like Lisp or Haskell 
such bugs cause runtime or compile time errors. In Q, they can mostly be 
avoided with -w. Not always; Q is a sharp knife. ;-) More subtle 
problems which cannot be caught with -w/--pedantic have to do with Q's 
dynamic typing and unbounded ad-hoc polymorphism; there's no way to warn 
about these without severely restricting Q's expressiveness, so you'll 
have to resort to the debugger or unit tests to find them.

Burton Samograd wrote:
> [lots of debugger output snipped]
> # just hangs here, and I have to hit ctl-c
> <9> [~/.q] .Wed Aug 23 16:50:18.
> q cat --no-prelude -d -c 'cat2 (fopen "cat" "r")'
> **  fopen "cat" "r"  ==>  <<File>>
>   0>  cat, line 8: cat2 <<File>>  ==>  () if feof <<File>>
> (type ? for help)
> : c
> cat F:String = cat_file (fopen F "r");
>   C-c C-c! Break
> 
>>>>cat2 (fopen "cat" "r")                          ^
> 
> # hangs here too

So what happened here was that with --no-prelude fgetc never read 
anything, because it wasn't defined, hence feof never became true, and 
the cat function looped without actually doing anything else. And you 
saw the same symptom with the second definition, because in the second 
equation for cat2 you didn't recursively call cat2, but the flawed cat 
function. After fixing that cat2 worked ok for me.

Just for the record, here is the corrected script:

cat F:String = cat_file (fopen F "r");
cat F:File = cat_file F;
cat F = cat_file (fopen (str F) "r") if issym F;
       = prints "cat: unsupported type";
cat_file F:File = () if feof F;
	   = writec (freadc F) || cat F otherwise;

cat2 F = () if feof F;
        = writes (freads F) || writes "\n" || cat2 F otherwise;

(Well, obviously you still have to define prints somewhere, and copy the 
definition of issym from the standard library script typec.q if you want 
to run the script with --no-prelude.)

BTW, another way to copy a text file, for the lazy programmer, is to use 
clib::fget which slurps an entire file in at once and returns it as a 
string. E.g.: 'cat F = fputs (fget F);'. There are also various 
low-level I/O functions in clib which allow arbitrary (possibly binary) 
files to be read and written in big chunks.

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag

Re: [q-lang-users] Just starting with Q

[Burton S. <kr...@gm...>]

I don't have too much time but here's a quick session using my current
Q version, right from cvs (my comments start with a #):  As can be
seen, it works with no prelude, but now it just seems to hang without
the prelude.  This version of Q was pulled from CVS and built last
night.  Hopefully this might be of help.  Oh, and I'm on a Pentium 4
running Gentoo with no wacky CFLAGS other than the -O2 -g defaults.
This seems to be a strange problem, but I don't have any time right
now to look more...I shall later. Hope this helps a bit.

<9> [~] .Wed Aug 23 16:46:05.
cd .q
<9> [~/.q] .Wed Aug 23 16:46:08.
cat cat
cat F:String = cat_file (fopen F "r");
cat F:File = cat_file F;
cat F = cat_file (fopen (str F) "r") if issym F;
      = prints "cat: unsupported type";
cat_file F:File = () if feof F;
	   = putc (fgetc F) || cat F otherwise;

cat2 F = () if feof F;
       = writes (freads F) || writes "\n" || cat F otherwise;
<9> [~/.q] .Wed Aug 23 16:48:12.
q cat -d -c 'cat (fopen "cat" "r")'
**  clib::sys_vars  ==>  (1,2,4,...)
--  def (SIZEOF_CHAR,SIZEOF_SHORT,SIZEOF_INT,...) = (1,2,4,...)
--  def SIG_IGN = -1
--  def SIG_DFL = 0
--  def SIG_TRP = 1
--  def SCHED_OTHER = 0
--  def SCHED_RR = 1
--  def SCHED_FIFO = 2
--  def AF_UNIX = 1
--  def AF_FILE = 1
--  def S_ISUID = 2048
--  def S_ISGID = 1024
--  def S_ISVTX = 512
--  def S_IRWXU = 448
--  def S_IRUSR = 256
--  def S_IWUSR = 128
--  def S_IXUSR = 64
--  def S_IRWXG = 56
--  def S_IRGRP = 32
--  def S_IWGRP = 16
--  def S_IXGRP = 8
--  def S_IRWXO = 7
--  def S_IROTH = 4
--  def S_IWOTH = 2
--  def S_IXOTH = 1
**  this_thread  ==>  <<Thread>>
--  def clib::MAIN_THREAD = <<Thread>>
**  1e+307*1e+307  ==>  inf
--  def inf = inf
**  inf-inf  ==>  nan
--  def nan = nan
--  def i = complex 0 1
--  def NOARG = 0
--  def REQARG = 1
--  def OPTARG = 2
**  fopen "cat" "r"  ==>  <<File>>
  0>  cat, line 2: cat <<File>>  ==>  cat_file <<File>>
cat F:String = cat_file (fopen F "r");
cat F:File = cat_file F;
cat F = cat_file (fopen (str F) "r") if issym F;
      = prints "cat: unsupported type";
cat_file F:File = () if feof F;
	   = putc (fgetc F) || cat F otherwise;

cat2 F = () if feof F;
       = writes (freads F) || writes "\n" || cat F otherwise;
()
<9> [~/.q] .Wed Aug 23 16:49:02.
q cat --no-prelude -d -c 'cat (fopen "cat" "r")'
**  fopen "cat" "r"  ==>  <<File>>
  0>  cat, line 2: cat <<File>>  ==>  cat_file <<File>>
(type ? for help)
: c
  C-c C-c! Break
>>> cat (fopen "cat" "r")
                         ^
# just hangs here, and I have to hit ctl-c
<9> [~/.q] .Wed Aug 23 16:50:18.
q cat --no-prelude -d -c 'cat2 (fopen "cat" "r")'
**  fopen "cat" "r"  ==>  <<File>>
  0>  cat, line 8: cat2 <<File>>  ==>  () if feof <<File>>
(type ? for help)
: c
cat F:String = cat_file (fopen F "r");
  C-c C-c! Break
>>> cat2 (fopen "cat" "r")                          ^
# hangs here too

Re: [q-lang-users] Symbol type

[Burton S. <kr...@gm...>]

On 8/23/06, Albert Graef <Dr....@t-...> wrote:
> Burton Samograd wrote:
> > Is the Symbol type left out for a reason, or
> > is it under a different name that I haven't found yet?  Would there be
> > any objection to adding it?
>
> Yes, in fact it would be fairly useful to have a Symbol type (and
> subtypes FunSymbol and VarSymbol) for doing meta-programming, but that
> interferes with Q's current type system which only has single
> inheritance. Hence a constant symbol couldn't be a member of its own
> (user-defined) type, which might have its own supertype, and the Symbol
> type at the same time. So, until Q gets multiple inheritance, you'll
> just have to put up with the issym function and friends.

Makes sense.  Thanks for the response. I'll make due without until then.

-- 
burton samograd                                                kr...@gm...
kruhft.boldlygoingnowhere.org              www.myspace.com/kruhft

Re: [q-lang-users] Symbol type

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Burton Samograd wrote:
> Is the Symbol type left out for a reason, or
> is it under a different name that I haven't found yet?  Would there be
> any objection to adding it?

Yes, in fact it would be fairly useful to have a Symbol type (and 
subtypes FunSymbol and VarSymbol) for doing meta-programming, but that 
interferes with Q's current type system which only has single 
inheritance. Hence a constant symbol couldn't be a member of its own 
(user-defined) type, which might have its own supertype, and the Symbol 
type at the same time. So, until Q gets multiple inheritance, you'll 
just have to put up with the issym function and friends.

We've actually discussed the issue of multiple inheritance here a while 
ago and, looking at the code, I found that extending the construction 
algorithm for the pattern matching automaton to handle multiple 
supertypes is not straightforward. So I'm postponing this until I have a 
bytecode compiler written in Q itself (that's one of the reasons I'm 
working on Q Yacc and Lex), this will make it much easier to implement 
such changes.

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag

Re: [q-lang-users] Just starting with Q

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Burton Samograd wrote:
> I did just check your above code and my own code, and neither of them
> run when the --no-prelude option is given (both return the "cat
> <<File>>") but both work fine otherwise.

Strange. What's your hardware platform? If you have the time, please do 
send me a debug log of the failing computation, i.e., with --no-prelude 
-d. Maybe I can then figure out what's going on there.

> Yes, that is true; bugs always lurk, and I have to admit, I'm really
> good at finding the obscure ones over the course of my lifetime ;-)

Then you're most welcome here. ;-) What we really need now that Q slowly 
gains more traction is a lot of testing. Q has been quite stable for a 
while now, but in the 7.x series I added a bunch of important new 
features for which I had to touch almost every source module, so some 
fallout from these changes was to be expected.

The new Q Yacc and Lex also keep shaking out compiler bugs, like program 
generators often do, so I'm planning to do another bugfix release as 
soon as I'm finished with those tools. It would be nice if this release 
could also address the issue that you encountered.

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag