On 16 Aug 2000 13:40:29 +0200
Friedrich Dominicus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> <stuff deleted></stuff deleted>
>
> >I think if I had
> > to use one language for everything, CL would definitely
> be a
> > candidate. Of course, Haskell is so much prettier.
> I'm on my way learning both languages. IMO Lisp a more
> programmer
> friendly language. I guess both are simular difficult (or
> easy it's a
> matter of taste) to lean. And both have their special
> merits. But at
> the moment I think Lisp is much prettier than Haskell.
Well, just for the record, I've programmed in both Common LISP and Scheme, and am
currently learning Haskell, but I found Scheme to be a much cleaner language than CL
(so much so, in fact, that Scheme was my favorite in college, and CL was my least
favorite).
Scheme is a compact language (when I studied it, it had only about 50 built-in
functions); CL is a huge language (it had about 500 built-in functions). Besides,
some of the semantics (closure properties, in particular) are different (sorry, but I
don't have my copy of _Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs,_ by Abelson,
Sussman, & Sussman, with me right now :-) ).
The emphases placed in the courses using them were different, too: in CL,
side-effects were used often; in Scheme, strict functional programming was stressed,
and side-effects were rarely, if ever, used.
It just seemed that Scheme went much closer in the style of functional programming
than CL--one CL course even had an optional book on object-oriented extensions to CL!
I'm not necessarily saying that this is either good or bad, but that, at least in the
way it was taught, Scheme seemed more closer to the functional style of programming
than CL did.
Of course, Haskell was much more functional than Scheme. The issue seemed largely a
question of degree.
--Ben
--
Benjamin L. Russell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Furuike ya! Kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." --Matsuo Basho
