David Brown wrote:
I think the "failure" of the libaries to fail to agree is more an issue of the large, established vendors using their libraries as a selling point instead of making them a point of commonality.
Wouldn't be the first time the commercial lisp industry shot itself in the foot. :(
There aren't a lot of Common Lisp implementations, at least not that are still around. For the most part, people seem to choose either Allegro or Lispworks. Both are basically too expensive for an individual, hobbyist developer.
Why would they choose Allegro or Lispworks over SBCL or CLisp or CMUCL? (any other Common Lisp implementations I'm missing? I don't know if this is a lot but it's more than a couple.)
C has had a lot more implementations than common lisp, and it seems to be doing fine. The difference is that the libraries generally aren't proprietary products of each compiler, at least not any more.
I hadn't thought about all of the C implementations before but you are right about there being a lot. ANSI C would seem to be a smaller standard than the CL standard isn't it? Perhaps it is easier to make conforming implementations and compatible libraries?
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