Comment by joshmarlow
5 hours ago
I've often thought that s-expression diff-viewers would be very nice tooling. I've also often wondered how easy it would be to just sling s-expressions across the wire to execute in another environment. What would modern infrastructure look like if you could just have lambdas running lambdas?
Not sexps, but better.
Quite a while back I have read about a system based on Scheme , called termite (I don't remember which scheme that was) that can actually sling live running code/closures across network and execute them remotely..
Boggles my mind even today.
Probably this?
“Concurrency Oriented Programming in Termite Scheme”: http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/09-germain.pdf
Implemented in Gambit Scheme: https://github.com/FredericHamel/termite-scheme
Erlang also has this capability built in. You can do all kinds of weird stuff with it, it’s great.
in at least Common Lisp world slinging s-expressions is considered to be a hack, at best something you do in a development environment, like swank/slime wire protocol. one of the reasons is that a readtable is both powerful, user extendable, and has all kinds of default ways in which a malicious input would be detrimental. you can remove all kinds of reader macros like #.(xyzzy), but to make a truly bulletproof s-expression reader you'd have to build a json like subset from first principles. even things like colons in symbol name package:symbol will trip you up. it's been understood since long time ago, that common internet standards, like RFCs, are the preferred method. in which case the fact that it's an s-expression versus a json is pretty much irrelevant. it's a kind of reader/writer anyway.
You can configure (read) to be safe for this purpose.
It’s not a hack.