How newLisp Took My Breath (And Syntax) Away

Post by itistoday » Sun, Jan 10, 2010, 9:28 PM UTC

lispm wrote: post #26

KazimirMajorinc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Fexprs are easier to write and more expressive than macros. They can be mapped, applied, wrapped around other functions, fexprs and built in primitives, in the case of Newlisp, even mutated during runtime. Fexprs are lot of fun. And the price is - dynamic scope. More about dynamic scope later. * ORO is something in between "manual" memory management like in assembler in C and real GC. It is "more automatized" than…

the price of FEXPRs is not 'dynamic scope', the price is that compilation gets hopeless. No matter how fast your interpreter is, for most practical purposes a native code compiler will a) do some checks at compile time and b) the compiled code runs orders of magnitude faster. Dynamic scope is not about 'power', initially it was an implementation error. Then it stayed in Lisp for a while. Unfortunately most Lisp compi…

Post by eru » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 7:00 PM UTC

rw wrote: post #9

WalterGR wrote: post #5

The opinion of those who know significantly more than me is that newLisp is to be avoided. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788157 In most anything written by a fan of newLisp, you'll find something like the following (taken from the linked article): > Today, unfortunately, whenever someone mentions newLISP on an online forum frequented by adherents of another LISP, an almost clan-like flame war will erupt. An adh…

Step 0: don't pretentiously prepend "new" to the name of your language.

Post by qu1j0t3 » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 9:42 PM UTC

itistoday wrote: post #30

mahmud wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lispers can bicker over technicalities and matters of taste, but any programmer of a Lisp dialect would prefer to move to another, instead of using something else like Java or C++. At least I would. Even small Scheme-like dialects that are embedded in big libraries and industrial applications (stuff like Lush[1]) is very palatable to any Lisper (Arc, Goo and other curiosities are also interesting.) Not so with NewLis…

To someone who wants to use newLISP for calculating Pi to the nth digit, it might appear "fundamentally broken." Of course I don't know why on earth you would want to do that in the first place, using a program/language specialized for such a task would be a far brighter idea, as such, the doc you refers to correctly suggests using the 'bc' program. However, for someone who wants a Lisp for rapid web development, new…