Re: getting started with LISP
On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 19:45:29 -0500, dircha wrote:
> Is Scheme a proper subset of Common Lisp?
No. Scheme is a LISP "dialect" which attempts to remove LISPs ugliness
and restore its original, functional purity.
> What do you make of the available Free software runtimes, compilers, and
> libraries for each:
CLisp is widely used. I had a free (beer) license for Allegro Common
Lisp, and I liked it much better than CLisp. It isn't free (speech).
> is Scheme primarily an "academic" language, whereas Common Lisp is where
> you need to go to find mature library support for database interaction,
> sockets, and X11 toolkits?
CL has much, much more available for it.
I attended a lecture on Scheme where the lecturer (Ph.D. in Computer
Science) said Lisp was twice as useful as Scheme at ten times the cost
(bloat, etc.). He's a Scheme fanatic.
> I'd really appreciate any comments you have about that.
Why are you doing this? If it's an exercise, I recommend Scheme. If
you're doing "big" stuff, Lisp may be more suitable.
> I've been forcing myself to use and learn Emacs [...]
"People who use Emacs don't mention it simply because it's
so obviously natural that it doesn't make sense to say it explicitly.
OTOH people using vi don't mention it simply out of shame."
-- Stefan Monnier
<jwvy8nouykb.fsf-monnier+gnu.misc.discuss@gnu.org>
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