From ... From: Erik Naggum Subject: Re: Lisp is alive, was "Re: Common LISP: The Next Generation" Date: 1996/09/19 Message-ID: <3052137838003931@naggum.no>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 183965569 sender: erik@arcana.naggum.no references: <842908513snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk> <323f7b48.3843721@news.primenet.com> <3052030527425472@naggum.no> <843073365snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk> organization: Naggum Software; +47 2295 0313; http://www.naggum.no newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp [Cyber Surfer] | There may be free Lisps for most (if not all) platforms, but you | know how hard some programmers will resist new languages. some, perhaps, but the rush to C++ and Java showed me that programmers will drop their "favorite" language in the blink of an eye and embrace something new and "hot". however, I think the problem is more likely that text book authors are doing Lisp an enormous disfavor by mentioning it at all. recently, I had a look at David Harel : Algorithmics : The Spirit of Computing, from 1992, and its treatment of Lisp might as well have been written in 1962. and then there's the entries in Encyclopædia Britannica, which I have mentioned here previously: LISP (List Processor) is a language that is powerful in manipulating lists of data or symbols rather than processing numerical data. In this sense, LISP is unique. It requires large memory space and, since it is usually processed by an interpreter, is slow in executing programs. LISP was developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by a group headed by John McCarthy, then a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At that time, LISP was radically different from other languages, such as FORTRAN and ALGOL. Several versions have been developed from the LISP 1.5 introduced by McCarthy; Common LISP, released in 1984, is becoming the de facto standard of LISP. Other languages are functional, in the sense that programming is done by calling (i.e., invoking) functions or procedures, which are sections of code executed within a program. The best-known language of this type is LISP (from List Processing), in which all computation is expressed as an application of a function to one or more "objects." Since LISP objects may be other functions as well as individual data items (variables, in mathematical terminology) or data structures, a programmer can create functions at the appropriate level of abstraction to solve the problem at hand. This feature has made LISP a popular language for artificial intelligence applications, although it has been somewhat superseded by logic programming languages such as Prolog (from Programming in Logic). LISP (List Processing) can be used to manipulate symbols and lists rather than numeric data; it is often used in artificial-intelligence applications. | They'll need a good reason to install and play with a Lisp. that good reason is called "curiosity". a programmer who does not possess curiosity should not be allowed to write code for others. and if we cannot trust the curiosity of programmers, nothing will ever happen. however, the curious programmer should be able to find some _correct_ and _updated_ information about Lisp where he might be likely to look. #\Erik -- those who do not know Lisp are doomed to reimplement it