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From: lgm@polaris.ih.att.com (Lawrence G. Mayka)
Subject: Re: C vs LisP yet again (long but thoughtful)
In-Reply-To: schwartz@roke.cse.psu.edu's message of 23 Sep 1994 17:56:03 GMT
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In article <SCHWARTZ.94Sep23135603@roke.cse.psu.edu> schwartz@roke.cse.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) writes:

   From: schwartz@roke.cse.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz)
   Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,uk.lisp
   Date: 23 Sep 1994 17:56:03 GMT
   Organization: Penn State Comp Sci & Eng

   jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

      Perl is not "as efficiently as possible".

   Very often it is.  And Perl users are sensible; they look for the
   balance you mention above, and discover something that meets their
   needs.  The point is that perl is a counterexample to the assertion that
   C users are wedded to the idea of arduous low level bit twiddling.

No, it only proves the point: All too many C users apparently assume
that any abstraction above bit twiddling constitutes "scripting" and
therefore requires dozens of twisty little interpreted languages, all
different.  (Consider everything from ksh to perl to awk to makefiles
to ...)  This point of view is rather perplexing to those of us who
use a single, compiled-to-machine-instructions language quite capable
of both bit-twiddling and "scripting": ANSI Common Lisp.
--
        Lawrence G. Mayka
        AT&T Bell Laboratories
        lgm@ieain.att.com

Standard disclaimer.
