Re: Is Lisp a Blub?

On Jul 4, 1:48 am, Matthew D Swank <akopa-is-very-much-like-my-mail-
addr...@xxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 03 Jul 2007 22:22:31 -0700, m...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
I miss the old Dylan. I keep thinking I'll get around
to writing an implementation of a language like it, but with some
updated libraries and things. I've gone so far as to write a couple of
interpreters and a compiler for subsets of it. My exciting health
issues put a stop to that (and almost everything else) for a while,
but it's not cmpletely out of the realm of possibility that I'll
evnetually produce something along those lines, if only to please
myself.

Well there is goo:http://people.csail.mit.edu/jrb/goo/though it seems
kind of comatose at this point.

As a language qua language, the old s-expression Dylan is still my
favorite.

I suppose s-expression syntax is not something modern Dylan users want
to embrace. Do any current Dylan implementors still read this list?

On the other hand, if s-expression Dylan was a language a Lisper wanted to
use, it probably wouldn't be too hard to write a preprocessor using the
pretty printer in LTD:http://norvig.com/ltd/doc/ltd.html. Given Dylan's
more traditional write/compile cycle, s-expressions -> Dylan would just be
another stage. Good Old Fashioned Interactive Development (tm) would
require more work of course.

There is a small but nonzero chance that I will eventually finish an
implementation of a (circa 1992) Dylan-like language that works in the
familiar way that Lisp programmers expect, with a REPL and incremental
compilation and so on.

There is zero chance that I will ever even start an implementation
that doesn't work that way, because I have not the slightest interest
in it.

Apple's original Dylan implementation, when the language was still
called "Ralph", was a set of extensions to MCL. In fact, an entire MCL
environment was available, with Common Lisp editors and listeners,
alongside the Dylan editors and listeners. The compiled Dylan code ran
on a differennt processor--an ARM board was ribbon-cabled to our Mac
development platforms--but aside from that, interacting with Dylan was
scarcely different from interacting with Common Lisp.

The "more traditional write/compile cycle" you refer to is just one
more reason I don't care to use current Dylan implementations.


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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Blues Poetics in Dylans Verbal Art (long)
    ... This issue is devoted to Dylan. ... Blues Poetics in Bob Dylan’s Verbal Art ... we will focus on language use. ...
    (rec.music.dylan)
  • Re: Relationship of Lisp and Dylan
    ... It is a language destined for the scrap heap of computational ... > and I remember a couple years going to the Dylan presentation. ... I couldn't understand why Common Lisp was missing from the ... Dylan distinguished the development environment from the ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Is Lisp a Blub?
    ... Actual experiences using it after having used (in approximate chronological order) ... I may be leaving a few out but for me, to this day nothing is as convenient as common lisp (though I've always thought scheme, forth smalltalk and dylan were pretty nice languages as well). ... I think I'd probably give up programming if I could only use a statically typed language like ocaml or haskell - or I'd just implement a toy dynamic language on top of one of these and use that instead. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: ARC or ARCH ?
    ... >> Java won. ... were right to try to design a better language than Common Lisp. ... Dylan is better than ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Relationship of Lisp and Dylan
    ... >share from Scheme. ... It is a language destined for the scrap heap of computational ... and I remember a couple years going to the Dylan presentation. ... If those marketing and R&D dollars had ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)