Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Unix Lisp Environments (why the slow evolution)
Keywords: resistance to lisp
Message-ID: <487@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 29 May 89 18:50:05 GMT
References: <31670@sri-unix.SRI.COM> <469@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1028@syma.sussex.ac.uk>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 37

In article <1028@syma.sussex.ac.uk> aarons@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
>There is some evidence, albeit based only on a number of cases
>rather than systematic research, that it is much easier to convert
>people to Lisp-like ways of thinking if you give them a Lisp-like
>language (with all the benefits of incremental compilation,
>integrated editor, garbage collector, pattern matcher, lists,
>records, arrays, tuples, etc etc) but not a lisp-like syntax.
>
>Instead provide a syntax that is richer, more readable, and above
>all more familiar to them.
>
>I am of course, referring to Pop-11

Over the years, quite a few preprocessors have been written.
These preprocessors convert some more conventional notation
to Lisp.  None of them has caught on in the Lisp community.
So I guess that shows there are some people who actually
prefer the Lisp syntax.

Of course, Pop-11 isn't a preprocessor.  But it's still true,
I think, that syntax is a matter of taste.

>Here's how you let the variables x, and y, iterate over the elements
>of lists L1 and L2 in Pop-11, so that you can apply function f to
>one element from each list:
>
>    for x, y in L1, L2 do
>        f(x,y)
>    endfor;

Lisp macros are an alternative to preprocessors that can work well
in some cases.  For example, the loop above could be written

     (loop for x in L1 and y in L2
           fo (f x y))

-- Jeff