Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: So who's really using LISP? Message-ID: Date: 15 Feb 91 14:31:11 GMT References: <1227@culhua.prg.ox.ac.uk> <1991Feb11.204514.19880@Neon.Stanford.EDU> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Distribution: comp Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 43 Nntp-Posting-Host: odin In-reply-to: jinx@zurich.ai.mit.edu's message of 12 Feb 91 18:25:49 GMT On 12 Feb 91 18:25:49 GMT, jinx@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Guillermo J. Rozas) said: jinx> The real question is what the expressive power of the language is jinx> and whether Scheme "gives up" some of Common Lisp's expressive jinx> power. I don't think the answer is clear. I beg to disagree. To my it is *clear* that the expressive power of Scheme, with all the options, is superior to that of CL, as Scheme can do things that CL cannot do in any way. Note that I am not saying that Scheme can do everything that CL can do *in the same way*; some rewriting may be needed. But there are things that Scheme can do that CL cannot do under any rewriting. jinx> In other words, richer languages don't necessarily mean slower or jinx> worse languages, while it seems that richer instruction sets mean jinx> slower machines. If they are richer, not just bulkier because they include, like the abominable Ansi C, the libraries in the language definition. Just look at this: the Scheme report, for the core language, and it is one that includes (optional) rationals and complexes (arrgggh!), is well under a hundred pages; the CL one is well over a thousand. Nearly two orders of magnitude. Does this make CL almost two orders of magnitude "richer" or "more useful", whatever your metric is, than Scheme? Hardly... jinx> I am firmly in the Scheme community but often envy Common Lisp jinx> constructs and features. Maybe you just envy the CL libraries -- well, many Scheme implementations do have libraries as rich as those of most any CL system; T, and obviously CScheme, that you probably are using, come to mind. What little is missing can be usually implemented quite easily and quickly, with much less verbiage than in CL. CLOS? Well, I have just reread Abelson & Sussman (generics and packages), and there is something similar there. Not as fanatically overspecified as CLOS, but, incredibly, not that distant from it. -- Piercarlo Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk