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From: k p c <kpc@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov>
Subject: Re: A Lispish Perl?
In-Reply-To: Tom Christiansen's message of 28 Oct 1995 02:27:43 GMT
Message-ID: <1995Oct31.023605.21189@ptolemy-ethernet.arc.nasa.gov>
To: tchrist@mox.perl.com (Tom Christiansen)
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Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 02:28:57 GMT
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.lisp:19789 comp.lang.perl.misc:10373 comp.lang.scheme:14203 comp.lang.python:6616 comp.lang.tcl:37603

Quoth Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com>:
> :matching, and string processing) with straightforward Lisp-like syntax
                                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
...
> :Lisp, and I wish I could combine their strengths.  Please send mail (I
                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Hmm, reading in and between the lines, I think he is pretty clearly
saying that he wants something close to the syntax and everyday
semantics and library of Common Lisp, but with the regexps and pipes
and similar scripting language conveniences that Perl offers.  That is
not an unreasonable desire, IMHO.  Many of us want that, too.  In any
case, he explicitly mentioned a straightforward Lisp-like syntax.

> It's been too long for me to recall all that lisp offers -- what kinds of
                                                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> data structures are you looking for?  Perl has a pretty rich set of
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Here I think it's fair to say that you did not answer his question.

Let's say for the sake of the discussion that Perl has all the data
structure flexibility of CLOS and more.  Then unless Perl has made
some truly unprecedented changes recently, it is still the case that
its syntax is very different from Lisp.

To me and others, Perl is the most different from Lisp in syntax of
any programming language in widespread use today.  Perhaps to you Perl
and Lisp have similar syntax.  Speaking as somebody who has looked
closely at Perl (before Perl 5) but rejected it almost solely on the
basis of its syntax, I find that an extraordinary opinion!

Perl has many features, even unusual things Lisp has like
multiple-value-setq.  But I would not call its syntax like Lisp.

> What other stuff would you be looking for?

I presume that he wants, as many of us do, a Lisp that does easy pipes
and fast regexps.  I would be satisfied with a fast, small CL with
built-in regexps and threads, but know of nothing perfect yet.

In addition to gcl, cmucl, clisp, and commercial Lisps, he might
consider such programs as scsh, guile, various other schemes, emacs
lisp (emacs -batch), and xlisp.  Some of these might require foreign
functions.  Some (the CL's) can implement partial regexps in Lisp
itself.  Some have them built in.  They have varying piping
capabilities and varying startup speeds and sizes.  I happen to prefer
CL, so the progress in speed and Unixisms by scheme compilers is only
relevant to me inasmuch as they have improving CL libraries as well.

Until I get a suitably CLish, fast, small, regexping Lisp, I'm
sticking with zsh and all those little Unix utilities, not Perl, for
most shell scripts, We're not too far away from what we need, and some
(such as some of the above scheme authors) think we're there already.

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---
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kpc@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov.  AI, multidisciplinary neuroethology, info filtering.
