Re: O: gnu-standards -- GNU coding standards
On Sun, Apr 07, 2002 at 08:39:12PM -0500, Joe Wreschnig wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-04-07 at 20:29, mdanish@andrew.cmu.edu wrote:
> > Whatcha mean "becoming"? Lispers have been blurring the line between
> > data and code for the last half-century.
>
> Speaking as a budding LISPer (working my way through "On Lisp" while my
> classes ruin my brain with Java), I'm well aware of this. But aside from
> DSSSL, it never became very popular with software documentation writers,
> who preferred troff, HTML, TeX, etc, and either the capabilities didn't
> exist, or they weren't used. Count the number of DSSSL stylesheets in
> Debian, and then the number of XML documents. Or the number of
> LISP-generated documents versus the number of static documents.
Well one of my friends likens TeX to a "wannabe Lisp", and is currently
dabbling in creating a Common Lisp-based document typesetter.
Certainly such programs have existed in the past, I have heard of several
typesetting systems mentioned in passing; most likely in connection with
Lisp machines.
But a document typesetting system wasn't my real point, which was:
Lisp code is data, and the data is often code. This principle is
key to several features of Lisps, such as macros (which indubitably
you must have been bombarded with in "On Lisp") and program-writing
programs, not to mention symbolic programming. This and a number of
other features of modern Lisps have created a number of issues with
licenses, such as the GPL, that are rather C-centric. I know there
are many Lisp programmers who are not very comfortable with the GPL
and stick to BSD-like or public domain (CMUCL is one major project
like so).
>
> I was actually wondering when I wrote my first message if any package in
> Debian was using LISP for document creation, but I couldn't think of any
> offhand. Thanks. :)
Just don't take the code from that source as a stellar example of macro
programming, if you can ever read it. ;)
It's a really horribly convoluted macro, which shouldn't have been a macro,
which I wrote in a very short time a long time ago when I didn't know
anything anyhow. But it does work...
If you consider generation of HTML to be document creation, there's a
number of systems which do so in Lisp; I have used one for web-app
development. See http://ww.telent.net/cliki/Web
I think that Manuel Serrano (upstream for Bigloo) now has a system
called Scribe that is written in Bigloo scheme. You might want to take
a look at that as well. It's now used for Bigloo docs.
--
; Matthew Danish <mdanish@andrew.cmu.edu>
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; "There is no dark side of the moon really; matter of fact, it's all dark."
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