Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!usc!ucsd!sdcc6!mbongo!djohnson From: djohnson@mbongo.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave? Message-ID: <15948@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> Date: 23 Jan 91 23:44:19 GMT References: <17374@csli.Stanford.EDU> Sender: news@sdcc6.ucsd.edu Organization: CSE Dept., UC San Diego Lines: 27 Nntp-Posting-Host: mbongo.ucsd.edu In article <17374@csli.Stanford.EDU> ceb@csli.Stanford.EDU (Charles Buckley) writes: >Finally, here's someone else says: LISP !-> AI > > The Big Win is: Storage management in Lisp is a non-issue. > >Exact. Makes prototyping a breeze. OK, I'm another person who likes LISP but doesn't do "AI". Lack of worry about storage management is nice, but only part of the picture. What I like is that I don't even have to specify I/O. If I want to test out an algorithm, I needn't worry about input routines to read and parse everything or to get things printed back out. This is especially useful when I want to test a function that isn't the "main" function. In C I spend lots of time writing wrapper code just to test functions. Also, type declaration is optional (until you want to improve compilation), compilation is optional, etc. So in essence, you can quickly whip up a program (I don't like the word prototype - sounds too much like software eng), test it out, and then convert it to C or something if you need to. (and if you wrote it with the correct mindset, converting to C is straightforward) -- Darin Johnson djohnson@ucsd.edu - Political correctness is Turing undecidable.