Useful verifiers exist. Coq is a state-of-the-art verifier for a large class of propositions. It hasn't been easy to create. Its design is not frozen.

We need to create a specification for safe remote code that is trustworthy. This seems difficult when permitting all the remote code capabilities that we want.

We need to demonstrate constructing specification-compliant code for a nontrivial algorithm with a proof of compliance. This seems costly but feasible.

Except for not being a dog, such a spider is anticipated in Goethe's little poem «Annonce» (Advertisement):

    A little dog is sought
    that never barked nor bit
    takes broken glass as feed
    leaves diamonds as - -

Here I'll leave it to others whether this is smart and laudable or sneaky and regrettable. Perhaps it's normal and unremarkable, but I find it interesting. It is only a guess on my part that this is intentional and coordinated.

You can also use GnuPG or openssl to encrypt a file or a disk image.

Lately I took a look at actual filesystems for cross-platform use. I didn't find a great one, but depending on which OS you want to burden with an extra driver, pretty good ones include exFAT, NTFS, and UDF specifically version 2.01. Like you, I am curious whether better answers are available.

Another route, my present hobby and something that I know many have done before: Take the Lisp program on page 10 of the Lisp 1.5 User Manual and translate it into C. Write a simple tokenizer/parser (read function) in C and translate that into Lisp. Once the C program can run the equivalent Lisp program, we're on our way.

At the outset I have no garbage collection. I just expect the memory space to fill up pretty soon. I could have `cons` compute a hash for each cell to eliminate common subexpressions, but for a while I suppose I won't bother at all. The C program has a loop to handle evcon (did I write cons? oops), eval, and apply as a trio of mutually tail-recursive operations. That's an obvious place to put a stop-the-world mark-and-sweep operation or some such thing.

To get the C tools out of the loop eventually, hand-disassemble the binary program (C compiler output) just to see what's there. Then write a Lisp program (compiler) that translates the Lisp 1.5 User Manual program into something pretty similar.

* [The Mystery of the Tower Revealed: A Non-Reflective Description of the Reflective Tower](http://www.cs.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/techreports/TRNNN.cgi?trnu...) [abstract](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/Bibliography.html#WandFried...)

* [Reflection](http://library.readscheme.org/page11.html)

Maybe abstraction is only a means to [expressiveness](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/254867/100375).

Yes, they have. I am NOT one of them. I don't have one of those guides. But I've received enough mandatory training to have a layperson's understanding of the baseline in my national jurisdiction which is USA. The baseline is twofold, it is fairly clear, and it is worth reviewing. Don't take my word for it, but I think if you check your authorities you may get confirmation.

First, no "quid pro quo." That is, you should steer clear of even the appearance that you will provide business advantage in exchange for affectionate acts from a person who is sexually attractive to you. This principle is an excellent reason not to ask an interviewee to go out on a date (slightly simplifying an example from elsewhere in recent Hacker News).

Second, no "hostile environment." That is, you should steer clear of even the appearance that you are making the workplace uncomfortable for people who are sexually attractive to you. Decorating your desk with a calendar featuring glamour photos of models, unless that is your duty in your occupation, is not a very good idea.

May I respectfully take issue though with the turn of phrase "we shouldn't need women to tell us"? Does that wording illustrate a problem by assuming that women are outsiders?

I write "illustrate" because I doubt that you really make that assumption. I don't really mean to single you out. I just felt that this language throws light on one of the problems facing women in our computing workplaces.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9162438

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9128661

Points: 1

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My first thought was the Software Freedom Conservancy. The only reasons I see for them not to take GPG under their wing are lack of will (but why?), sense of funding priorities (but why?), or the possibility that some GPG constituents would be concerned about associating GPG strongly with a US-based organization.

Then Sage (sagemath.org) just dazzles me. It's a grand integrated environment using Python with lots of math/stat software built in (including NumPy and R) and lots more optional (including Matlab). You can just go see it and try it at cloud.sagemath.com. If you like it you can continue to use it there or you can download it - it's free open-source software.

I appreciate that these two features are crucial.

1. In the Python code of the interpreter, "Instead of making a recursive call that returns a value that is then immediately returned again by the caller, we can instead alter the value of x (and sometimes env) in the original invocation of eval(x, env). We are free to do that whenever the old value of x is no longer needed." That is how we implement proper tail calls. Thus we avoid inflating the call stack needlessly, continually, and hugely.

2. Testing.

The rest seems incremental to me, at least by comparison. I'm not even that excited about the famous Lisp macros. I think I haven't arrived there yet. I do appreciate that backquote reduces contortions just like `%` aka `str.format` does in Python.