KQML (Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language)

Roy

KQML (Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language)

KQML is a language for describing the exchange of information among agents. Agents are one of the paradigms for how knowledge is accumulated and processed in a distributed heterogeneous environment like the World Wide Web. Telescript uses the agent paradigm. Standards for the interoperability of such agents are crucial to their use on the web, and KQML and its siblings provide such a standard.
Linda

WWWinda: An Orchestration Service for WWW Browsers and Accessories describes an extensible web browser architecture that uses Linda as the extension language.
Lingo

Lingo is the object-based scripting language for Macromedia's Director multimedia authoring system created by John Thompson. It is often compared to ScriptX, Telescript, Java, Tcl, and HyperTalk, resembles the latter most, but it is more special purpose than any of those. It is specific to Director, which is used extensively for authoring CD-ROM titles, and is not available separately, which limits its applicability to other purposes. With the release of ShockWave, a free Netscape plug-in, software developed with Director can be displayed in Netscape, and soon other browsers.
Lisp

Lisp is a lisp processing language created for artificial intelligence research by John McCarthy at MIT in the late fifties.

Common Lisp is the dialect of Lisp with the most widespread current use, especially for large complex systems (esp. artificial intelligence) in industry, government, and academia. It was designed in the early eighties with some DARPA sponsorship by representatives of the several lisp dialects in use at that time as a way to converge on a common dialect. There is some use of Common Lisp for web-based server applications. CWEST is a tool to convert CLIM GUIs to HTML and GIFs for display with a client's browser. CL-HTTP is an HTTP server implemented in Common Lisp and targeting the intersection of the interactive hypermedia and artificial intelligence research domains. Harlequin, the vendor of a commercial Common Lisp, offers WebMaker, which enables conversion of Framemaker documents to HTML.

Scheme is a statically scoped dialect of Lisp in widespread use, primarily in academia for research and educational purposes. Scheme48 is an implementation of Scheme that compiles to a byte-code representation that is then executable by a Virtual Machine, much like Java does. The Scheme Underground is an MIT project aimed at developing a substantial body of Scheme48 software, including software appropriate to the Internet (e.g. TeX->HTML, Web agents, tk). Scheme48 for collaborative Engineering? is an interesting review by Dan Connolly of the W3C on Scheme48's suitability for Internet programming and the suitability of the Scheme48 Virtual Machine as the common vm for a myriad of Internet programming languages (e.g. Python, Perl, Icon, Tcl, Smalltalk).

Emacs-Lisp (Elisp for short) is the dialect of Lisp used to implement and extend the Emacs text editor, which was developed at MIT in the sixties. It is similar to Common Lisp, but smaller and free, and is in very large distribution, as it is comes with Emacs. A browser, GNUscape Navigator, has been implemented in, and is extensible with, Elisp. Due to its widespread use as a scripting language, its small size, and the long-term Internet-awareness of its large user base, I would have expected to see some effort to apply Elisp to client-side applet execution, but I see no evidence of such an effort.

WINTERP is a GUI development environment comparable to Tcl/Tk and Python, but based on XLISP-PLUS, a small object-oriented lisp implementation, and including interfaces to the X Windows and Motif libraries. WINTERP runs on a variety of Unix platforms (XLISP runs on a variety of platforms), but has not been ported elsewhere. While WINTERP seems as suitable for adaptation to Internet programming as Tcl/Tk and Python, I see no effort to move it in that direction.

The Future of Lisp is an interesting comparison of Lisp, Dylan, C++ and Java by some of their creators.

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