NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/comp/sys/amiga/programm/15522

Text File | 1992-11-08 | 1.9 KB | 42 lines

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From: [e-mail] (Steve Koren)
Subject: Re: LISP - Don't use it.
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Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1992 22:44:17 GMT
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Mike Meyer ([e-mail]) wrote:
(in response to Bjorn Stenberg):

> You don't know what you're talking about. The only thing that makes
> LISP-like languages "quick&easy to interpret" is that the syntax is
> trivial. Almost everything else about the language makes it HARD to
> implement. That's because the language is designed to be elegant and
> powerful, as opposed to easy to implement or easy to use.

Ok, I'll bite.  Why do you consider LISP as hard to implement?  I've
written a LISP interpreter to test some namespace caching techniques
I was working on.  It is fairly complete, and faster than GNU lisp
or X-lisp 2.0 by quite a bit in many cases.  I've also written both C
and Pascal compilers and a Unix ksh-like script language interpreter.
Of all those (all of which were done from ground zero), I consider LISP
as the easist to implement due to the fact that it is the most regular
and "orthogonal" of all of the languages mentioned above.  In fact,
once you get the parser done (which is very easy) LISP becomes almost
trivial to write if you use good object oriented programming techniques,
I think.  Why do you think it is more difficult to do?

(BTW, I'm not disagreeing; just curious about why you think that.
Everybody has their own concept of what is hard and what is easy, and
you can't say one is "right" or "wrong", of course.  I consider
hardware design almost impossibly hard, but its trival for lots of
folks :-) )

  - steve