why does it say LISP isn't a functional programming language but Clojure is? Isn't Clojure a dialect of Lisp?
The author forgets to specify, but he is talking about Common Lisp, not Lisp in general.
Before you start learning Lisp...
11–20 of 32 posts
Re: Before you start learning Lisp...
#12Re: Before you start learning Lisp...
#13From the article: > This is because the Lisp standard tries to specify a portable language, not a library. > Note that even the C language doesn't include these things. That's true, but the POSIX standard library functions are packaged with almost any C environment except for embedded systems and is usually available 'out of the box'. Of course there is a clear distinction between what is part of the language and wha…
Not really. Much of the stuff in stdlib is part of the CL standard. Most of the rest is available as part of most implementations. There is no (as I recal) standard library that every has and can expect to be available.
Re: Before you start learning Lisp...
#14From the article: > This is because the Lisp standard tries to specify a portable language, not a library. > Note that even the C language doesn't include these things. That's true, but the POSIX standard library functions are packaged with almost any C environment except for embedded systems and is usually available 'out of the box'. Of course there is a clear distinction between what is part of the language and wha…
Not for Common Lisp (CL), but a lot of what's in 'stdlib' for C is already in CL. Also a lot of implementations come with substantial extras, like f.e. sockets, that the article mentioned are not in the CL standard.
Incompatibilities in those extras between implementations are handled by meta-packages (libraries or modules in other programming languages) provided by the community.
Re: Before you start learning Lisp...
#15Should be titled "Before you start learning Common Lisp". Anyone with a reasonable functional programming background would know the difference.
Re: Before you start learning Lisp...
#16why does it say LISP isn't a functional programming language but Clojure is? Isn't Clojure a dialect of Lisp?
The author forgets to specify, but he is talking about Common Lisp, not Lisp in general.
While we're at it, the name "LISP" is obsolete. It's reminiscent of variants of the broader lisp family of languages, circa 1980. We're talking about Common Lisp instead, often shortened to "Lisp", being a much more modern language."
(Unless the author added that after the OP was submitted)
Re: Before you start learning Lisp...
#17Re: Before you start learning Lisp...
#18Does anybody have a good elsip project idea? I been trying to learn elisp but I didn't have good enough excuses to write anything in elisp.
write a hacker news reader so I won't have to exit emacs for that.
HN is pretty usable in w3m / emacs-w3m.
To log in you will have to patch your w3m to send "Content-Length" instead of "Content-length" (see http://arclanguage.org/item?id=4419 )
Re: Before you start learning Lisp...
#19why does it say LISP isn't a functional programming language but Clojure is? Isn't Clojure a dialect of Lisp?
I believe it's because Clojure constrains itself to immutable data structures, while Lisp allows both mutable and immutable structures. You can do functional programming in Lisp -- like you can many other non-functional languages -- but it isn't required as it is in Clojure.
Clojure has mutable data structures now. Apparently it was too hard to write a compiler to figure out what could be mutated, so now it's up to the programmer to perform that optimization.
Re: Before you start learning Lisp...
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author forgets to specify, but he is talking about Common Lisp, not Lisp in general.
While we're at it, the name "LISP" is obsolete. It's reminiscent of variants of the broader lisp family of languages, circa 1980. We're talking about Common Lisp instead, often shortened to "Lisp", being a much more modern language." (Unless the author added that after the OP was submitted)
I'm sorry, I mistated, the author forgat to specify what he meant by 'Lisp' before writting a page and a half on it. He did get around to it near the end of the article when all of the laypeople left confused about Lisp.