31–40 of 47 posts
Each implementation has its own way of doing things. Some are simple, and some are relatively baroque. Racket is more on the baroque end, though probably less so than CL.
A little off topic, but I notice a lot of people new to Emacs and Lisp banging there heads trying to get Slime set up and running, when Emacs has excellent Lisp support right out of the box. Slime is excellent, but complicated (even by Emacs standards). I wouldn't recommend a user installing it until a specific need arises. I can't imagine trying to learn Lisp, Emacs, and set up Slime all at once.
Setting up SBCL+Emacs+SLIME is really easy if you use Ubuntu or some other distro that contains packages for them. All you need to do in current Ubuntu is $ sudo apt-get install sbcl emacs slime && echo "(require 'slime)" >> ~/.emacs and then start emacs and press Alt+x, write `slime´ and press enter (M-x slime for the initiated). Now using all the available features of that combination will take a lot of time, but s…
Scheme isn't really a language like CL is. Scheme's R5RS standard is pretty minimal, and last time I checked (admittedly it's been awhile) R6RS is not that widely implemented (a lot of implementers never liked it). Each implementation has its own way of doing things. Some are simple, and some are relatively baroque. Racket is more on the baroque end, though probably less so than CL.
Go for Clojure. It's a modernized common-lisp with access to the wealth of Java libraries. There are resources online, and you should be able to get up and running in a matter of minutes.
If you're not already familiar with Emacs, save it and Slime for later.
newLISP is a scripting language with a Lisp-like syntax. It's designed to be a Lisp-flavoured alternative to Perl or PHP or AppleScript. The emphasis is on staying small (250Kb) and easy to install, learn, and use. As a non-programmer I'm not clever enough to learn CL or Clojure, but I found newLISP pretty easy to learn and use for day-to-day scripting tasks and CGI work. It's based on the ideas of Lisp, rather than…
If anyone's considering picking up newLISP, be advised they made some widely criticized design decisions (such as omitting lexical scope, closures, pass by reference, and GC) intended to speed up the interpreter. Last I heard, they don't plan on having a compiler. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=2911
Go for Clojure. It's a modernized common-lisp with access to the wealth of Java libraries. There are resources online, and you should be able to get up and running in a matter of minutes.
Would Clojure be worth trying rather than CL or Scheme for someone who doesn't have any Java experience, though?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you say LET and LET* have very different uses? I just use LET* if I need to reference a preceding variable in the same declaration (it happens). Actually I vaguely remember PG in one of his Lisp books saying LET* indicates bad code, something I never understood, though empirically I've noticed some evidence for it.
> LET* indicates bad code, something I never understood Neither did I, until I encountered something along the lines of: (let* ((foo ...) (foo ...) (foo ...) (foo ...) (foo ...) (foo ...) (foo ...)) ...)
(let ((foo ...))
(setf foo ...)
(setf foo ...)
...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anyone's considering picking up newLISP, be advised they made some widely criticized design decisions (such as omitting lexical scope, closures, pass by reference, and GC) intended to speed up the interpreter. Last I heard, they don't plan on having a compiler. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=2911
omitting lexical scope, closures, pass by reference, and GC None of those decisions were made for performance reasons, but because the creator of newLisp had no idea how to do them (lexical scope and call by reference were initially performance hacks, and actually make programs faster and/or smaller.) A better name for the language would have been newBASIC, but even Basic is garbage collected. People who intend to us…