Subject: Re: Need free/portable Lisp with Database access
From: rpw3@rpw3.org (Rob Warnock)
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 05:21:00 -0600
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme
Message-ID: <1PGdnfk4MbeBrRmjXTWc-w@speakeasy.net>
Christopher Browne  <cbbrowne@acm.org> wrote:
+---------------
| CLISP is free, and plays well enough on Unix and Windows, but has the
| huge demerit that it is rather painful to add additional APIs to it in
| any fashion that you'd hope would be portable.
| 
| I'm sure you can get something quasi-working with CLISP that would be
| quasi-portable; I would NOT be confident that it would scale nicely if
| you wanted to expand your use to Do Tough Stuff.
| 
| I'd feel slightly more confident about the interfaces for CMU/CL that
| talk to PostgreSQL, but that has the dual demerits that:
|   a) You asked for MySQL, and
|   b) CMU/CL is really "Unix-only."
+---------------

The real enabler here would be using PostgreSQL instead of MySQL[1], since
Eric Marsden's "pg.lisp" (see <URL:http://www.chez.com/emarsden/downloads/>)
works very nicely in both CMUCL & CLISP, and is pure Lisp code -- no FFI
hackery needed. [Though it does have a couple of feature tests in it here
and there to address various CL implementation oddities and to access the
non-standard but nearly-universal socket APIs...]


-Rob

[1] Some would encourage you to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL *anyway*,
    for reasons having nothing to do with Lisp, but that's verging towards
    being off-topic (and potentially inciting a flame war) so let's just
    leave it at that.

-----
Rob Warnock, PP-ASEL-IA		<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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