Subject: Re: a searchable index to the Common Lisp standard From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/02/03 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3127058734974099@naggum.no> * Kent M Pitman <pitman@world.std.com> | Nevertheless, you're right that there are a wealth of very usable online | documents for Lisp, and it's surprising that the other languages don't | have such things. | | Maybe it's harder to make such things in other languages. | ;-) it could also be that people using other languages don't care quite so much about the language as such. for instance, we have seen a lot of heat about Common Lisp not having a standard socket library and such, but nobody in their right mind would accuse C of not having the same, despite availability of socket libraries in all Common Lisp and C implementations alike. obviously, these people aren't just interested in having some piece of code "work" or "do the job" in the Perl sense, and are therefore more likely to want to know what the real thing says. I'm not so certain about the size of the book market for Lisp books, and whether the relatively small market contributes to the above, or whether the above contributes to the small market. however, the need for books that explain _all_ parts of Common Lisp is not at all satisfied. I have myself spent countless hours merely studying how things were supposed to be used from the HyperSpec and reading up on old literature and sometimes even talking with other Lispers. for instance, a friend of mine who has used Common Lisp since CLtL1 came out didn't know about PPRINT-DISPATCH. I had stumbled upon it when being intensely dissatisfied with the same data having four slightly different shapes depending on the recipient and that got translated into a lot of hairy code. there had to be a better way, and that turned out to be the pretty printer. it was great fun to tell him about it. #:Erik -- SIGTHTBABW: a signal sent from Unix to its programmers at random intervals to make them remember that There Has To Be A Better Way.