Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!shebs
From: shebs@Apple.COM (Stanley Todd Shebs)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: What's a PC? (was Re: Cynic's Guide to SE #6: Forthcoming)
Message-ID: <142@internal.Apple.COM>
Date: 25 Oct 88 17:39:04 GMT
References: <9@helens.stanford.edu> <39400002@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <4935@garfield.MUN.EDU> <197@ai.etl.army.mil> <396@uwslh.UUCP>
Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA
Lines: 38

In article <396@uwslh.UUCP> lishka@uwslh.UUCP (Fish-Guts) writes:
>In article <197@ai.etl.army.mil> mike@ai.etl.army.mil (Mike McDonnell) writes:
>>[...] manufacturing and marketing
>>ineptitude of the selling companies who have more-or-less insured that
>>"lispms" will never be much more than a curiosity.  Sigh.

Amen to that.  There are also technical reasons that have been argued over
endlessly.  My view is that specialized Lisp processors have never been
able to stay ahead of stock hardware and "normal" programming environments
for more than a year or two - if for no other reason than that the good
ideas in the Lisp environment get imitated/improved on elsewhere.  For
instance, Lispms have complicated and slow window systems, while the rest
of the world ends up using X.  Lispms have hardware for tags, now SPARC
has it too, but simpler and less obtrusive.  Nowadays the big push is to
have GC for every language, down to and including C.  Lisp isn't some sort
of magic that renders systems uncopyable; instead the Lisp marketeers are
in the unenviable position of pioneering, then being trampled by the hordes
following along and re-engineering!

>[...] trying to read Lisp for too long makes me see non-existant
>parentheses.

You have clearly failed to reach the level of true Lisp wizardry :-).
Parentheses are unimportant to reading, about as significant as commas
in most languages.  Indentation and special forms, that's all that counts.

>     One thing I have considered doing is adding an extensive
>preprocessor to Lisp, to make it look more "structured" (like C or
>Pascal).  Essentially, one would write in my structured language (call
>it CL), and the CL-parser would spit out Lisp code as an intermediate
>language, to be interpretted or compiled or whatever.

This has been done several times since the 60s.  LISP2, CLISP for Interlisp,
and RLISP for Portable Standard Lisp spring to mind immediately; there are
probably others.

							stan shebs
							shebs@apple.com