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From: peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: lisp
Message-ID: <649@sugar.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 5-Sep-87 14:52:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: sugar.649
Posted: Sat Sep  5 14:52:33 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 9-Sep-87 05:41:26 EDT
References: <855@tjalk.cs.vu.nl> <2683@hoptoad.uucp> <1519@sol.ARPA> <1931@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
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Xref: mnetor comp.lang.c:4216 comp.lang.lisp:445

> This is the usual reaction of non-LISP programmers.  I've used half a
> dozen dialects, none of which have the same syntax for defining
> functions.  And that's the main effect of a LISP program! 

Well, I'm not a non-LISP programmer. I'm also not a LISP-programmer. I'm
a programmer who has had occasion to do work in LISP on a few occasions.

Unfortunately, each time I've had to pretty much learn the language from
scratch...

> Syntax is one of the principal concerns of e.g., Basic, Pascal, C, PL1,
> Ada.  That's what most programmers spend most time on. 

In LISP, too. Unless, of course, you never use but one LISP. Or maybe you
carry around a bunch of standard functions the way Emacs types carry around
a set of standard macros. The first time you sit in front of the machine
you port your functions to it and forget how the underlying language works.

For people who aren't going to be making a career out of LISP or Emacs, it's
a bit disturbing to be told that we're going to have to sit down and figure
out a set of functions so we can operate in other environments.

> In LISP, however, we don't care about syntax.  If we don't like it, we
> rewire it.

Wouldn't it be easier to rewire if you could just keep your toolkit in
Lisp 1.5, so you could use a new system the day you sit in front of it
instead of a week later? FORTH has a similar capability, but if you know
Forth-77 and Forth-83 you can be up to speed in a new FORTH in an hour or
so.

For god's sake... define some subset language that will be available in
everyone's LISP, and stick to it.
-- 
-- Peter da Silva `-_-' ...!seismo!soma!uhnix1!sugar!peter
--                 'U`  <-- Public domain wolf.