Re: scripting in CL -- please comment

Tamas K Papp wrote:

While I can see the appeal of using CL for scripting, I'm interested in
why people choose this approach rather than using one of the lispy
dialects that have been specifically designed for this type of purpose.
I'm thinking of things like guile, lush, rep etc.

For me, it takes a lot of time to learn all the nooks and crannies of
a language, and doing this for the occasional script doesn't justify
the investment. Maybe all those dialects are "lispy",

Maybe?

They are more "lispy" than the monstrosity known as Commune-Lisp,
COBOL-Lisp, Commode-Lisp, etc.

This isn't comp.lang.commune-lisp, it's comp.lang.lisp.

Get it?


but they have
different names for standard functions,


Of what "standard" are you speaking?

This isn't comp.lang.commune-lisp, it's comp.lang.lisp.

Get it?

slightly different semantic
conventions, etc, all of which would lead to minor annoyances. So I
chose to roll the thing in CL, and I was pleased, it took very little
time.

To a Commode-Lisper, it seemed to take little time to produce that
huge, reeking, steaming pile of spaghetti-code (complete with "goto").
This proves that development in this "language" is always glacially
slow.

I will continue to do these things in the future.

One who has spent part of his life learning the ugly, convoluted,
massive COBOL-Lisp finds it too painful to face the realization
that all of that time was wasted. He must continue to serve the beast.


Guy L. Steele, Jr., July 1989:

I think we may usefully compare the approximate number of pages
in the defining standard or draft standard for several
programming languages:

Common Lisp 1000 or more
COBOL 810
ATLAS 790
Fortran 77 430
PL/I 420
BASIC 360
ADA 340
Fortran 8x 300
C 220
Pascal 120
DIBOL 90
Scheme 50


--

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