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From: shebs@utah-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Lisp books, Franz Lisp, Help
Message-ID: <1958@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 30-Sep-83 18:21:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.1958
Posted: Fri Sep 30 18:21:59 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 2-Oct-83 10:04:47 EDT
References: utcsrgv.2338
Lines: 27

A few additional comments:

1. I completely agree about the Franz Lisp manual - there's a whole body
of lore about how things *really* work.  I learned most of what I know
from Steve White at Boeing (ssc-vax!steve).  

2. A convention that Charniak et. al. recommends to help with variables
is to surround all global variables with stars.  That includes any that
are not standard local variables, in other words, anything not used in
the same function in which it is created.  Also, they should be minimized
in number - the closer to pure Lisp your program is, the more reliable.

3. For ordinary programming, Lisp is hardly preferable to C, Pascal, or
Modula-2 or whatever.  But for AI work, it is far superior, and in fact,
it's generally necessary to implement a Lisp-type interpreter sooner or
later, if one tries to do AI in an ordinary language.

4. Finally, you might consider using PSL instead of Franz.  I've been
using PSL (well, Utah is the home of PSL) for the past month, and it's
nicer than Franz in many ways - better documentation, a nice set of
loop macros, and a good selection of string processing functions, and
of course it's portable between a large number of machines.  There's
nothing quite like FTP'ing a program from a DEC-20 to a VAX, and having
it work *with* *no* *changes* *whatsoever*.  It's great...

						stan the l.h.
						utah-cs!shebs