This document provides information for the novice Internet user about using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). It explains what FTP is, what anonymous FTP is, and what an anonymous FTP archive site is. It shows a sample anonymous FTP session. It also discusses common ways files are packaged for efficient storage and transmission.

At the SIGPLAN '83 conference, a panel discussion was held to discuss what the important programming language issues might be in the 1980's. This paper is an edited transcript of the discussion.I want to thank John White, General Chairman for the conference, who suggested that we have the panel and Richard Probst and Tim Learmont from U.C. Berkeley who recorded and transcribed the discussion. In the transcript below we have identified the speakers where possible. We apologize to those members of the audience whose comments are included below but who are not identified because we did not know their name.

Most programming systems reflect a model of computation which sharply distinguishes between “passive” data objects and “active” program objects (procedures). Furthermore, procedures describe not only a set of computations but the precise flow of control between them. In contrast, a group at MIT is investigating a new paradigm called constraints in which a single kind of object models both data and procedures, and in which the description of procedures minimizes commitment to the order in which computational steps will be executed. A (primitive) constraint is an object with some parts, which correspond to fields of a data structure or input/output parameters of a procedure, and a body which describes how to compute the values of some parts from other parts. The body consists of rules written in an implementation language (Lisp in the MIT systems). Constraints with no body behave like ordinary data structures; constraints with substantial bodies behave more like procedures. However, unlike procedures, which always compute the same set of outputs from the same set of inputs, a constraint may compute in different directions depending on the available data.

This paper describes in detail the most interesting aspects of ByteLisp, a transportable Lisp system architecture which implements the Interlisp dialect of Lisp, and its first implementation, on a microprogrammed minicomputer called the Alto. Two forthcoming related papers will deal with general questions of Lisp machine and system architecture, and detailed measurements of the Alto ByteLisp system described here. A highly condensed summary of the series was published at MICRO-11 in November 1978 15 .