Brasstacks

My blogging has been much less frequent of late, mostly because of an unfortunate abundance of non-computer issues. Despite those, I believe I have made some progress in my Chaosnet-on-OpenMCL work, but I've switched most of my hobby-development to Python, mostly to get in touch with trends outside the Lisp Universe. My current main project circulates around ChaosNET emulation; the main thing going for Python here is a socket interface that is roughly compatible between UNIX-like and Windows operating systems. Lisp can support that as well, but not for my favorite and familiar implementations. (One thing I hope to try before I get through this is to get an asyncore-like framework set up in CLISP.) So far, I have implemented a `chaosd' process in Python that simulates multiple ChaosNET `ethers' in the form of localhost TCP streams (on Windows or UNIX-like) or UNIX-domain sockets (on UNIX-like); each stream corresponds to a subnet. The idea has manifold goals: Allow the...

Python isn't so bad. However, I find myself bothered by a few issues. The development environments are not as Emacs-oriented as Lisp environments are. My default installations of Emacs don't seem to come with Python mode, and I have mixed success doing SLIME-like development on Windows and Linux. For now, I use IDLE. I find it hard to view what is going on in the stepping debugger, including such basics as what line in the code I am currently stopped at, and have no apparent interactive inspection facility. (E.g. if I step through my code, I can see a local variable holds a dictionary, but see no way to expand the view so that I can see every entry in that dictionary, or to see the contents of objects contained in the dictionary.) Backtraces by default are limited in their description of the stack frames (also, Python's documentation (proudly?) states that Python uses the termination model for error-handling, although rumor has it the backtrace stacks include more infor...