Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!purdue!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!rpi!rpi.edu!rodney From: rodney@pawl.rpi.edu (Rodney Peck) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: LISPMs and UNIX Message-ID: Date: 12 May 89 13:46:37 GMT References: <4922@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1894@yunexus.UUCP> Sender: usenet@rpi.edu Organization: RPI Public Access Workstation Lab, Troy NY Lines: 44 oz@yunexus.UUCP (Ozan Yigit) wrote the following... -- Sorry not mine. Obviously because I cannot see the "TRUTH" or "THE RIGHT WAY" like you or the previous poster can see. Too bad. Oh, btw: when you two get a chance, do share that "RIGHT WAY" with the rest of the world, under a DEFUN, for everyone's edification. -- Well, oz, it's really hard to explain to someone why a lispm is so nice to program on. It's not the lisp really. It's more the completely integrated environment and the availability of documentation and source code in the editor via a keystroke. It makes for really fast code writing when you can say "Hey, the inspector does what I want to do here. I wonder how THEY did it." and then procede to snarf the source code and re-write parts of it for your application. As for the defuns, well, there's really nothing wrong with a defun as long as you are in an environment where you can do things properly. UNIX and the Lispm's are completely different philosophies of an operating system. You can't argue that lisp looks awful on a unix machine so lisp must be terrible. It turns out, however, that most of the code on a lispm is object orientated via the flavor system and doesn't really use defuns all that much. You do mostly defflavors and defmethods. Has anyone mentioned the Texas Instruments Explorer LX yet? It has a unix os which can be run in windows on the lispm. I've never seen it, but it sounds REALLY wierd. Obviously it has two processors, the 68000 or better and the Lisp chip. Actually, the whole thing must only share the file system since the data bus of the lispm has hardware data checking, etc. and really wide words. I don't know how they do it. --Rodney -- Rodney Peck II Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute rodney@pawl.rpi.edu Image Processing Lab (ECSE Department) Troy, NY 12180 (518)276-6397