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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: C vs LisP yet again (long but thoughtful)
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References: <CwJL6v.4sE@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <SCHWARTZ.94Sep23135603@roke.cse.psu.edu> <LGM.94Sep25111944@polaris.ih.att.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 17:33:21 GMT
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In article <LGM.94Sep25111944@polaris.ih.att.com> lgm@polaris.ih.att.com (Lawrence G. Mayka) writes:
>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 ...)

Just so.  But let's hope the Tcl flame fest currently singing
comp.lang.scheme doesn't leap over to comp.lang.lisp...
(RMS dared to say that an extension language s.b. a real
programming language.)

>  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.

I wish that CL implementations were better at some of that stuff,
though.  (But I haven't yet tried CLiCC or ECoLisp.)

-- jeff
