On Tue, 7 Nov 2000, Kevin D. Clark wrote:
> Lisp is a great language, but it does require some effort to learn.
> Many people find Lisp to be "sufficiently weird" so that they have
> trouble accomplishing their goals within the constructs of the
> language. Usually people in this state complain about there being
> "too many damn parentheses in this @#^$% language".
>
That's because LISP stands for Lots of Insanely Stupid Parantheses ;-)
Old joke from when I was studying lisp:
Q: How much memory does a LISP program need?
A: More
On a serious note, LISP is very different, because it is built for AI,
and around the idea that data & code are the same thing. In LISP, for
those who don't know, you've got atoms & lists (LISP actually stands
for List Processor), and a read-eval-print loop that evaluates things.
A program is a list of (lists atoms), some of which evaluate to actions. Data
is lists of (list atoms), including other programs (or it's own
program).
LISP heavily uses recursion, which is why it snarfs up memory
(actually, you don't have to use recursion, but it is extremely well
suited to using it). GNOME uses GUILE, another variant (although I
haven't found the differences) as it's code to tie things together.
Sawfish uses GUILE as it's customization language. For those who are
real masochists, you can check out esh, the Easy Shell, that uses Lisp
as it's shell scripting language.
For those who want to play with it, I'm relearning LISP via Scheme, a
variant of it, using the book _The Scheme Programming Language_ by R.
Kent Dybvig. So far, all the examples run under GUILE.
jeff
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffry Smith Technical Sales Consultant Mission Critical Linux
[EMAIL PROTECTED] phone:603.930.9739 fax:978.446.9470
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thought for today: toy program n.
1. One that can be readily comprehended;
hence, a trivial program (compare noddy). 2. One for which
the effort of initial coding dominates the costs through its life
cycle. See also noddy.
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