Nice Language

[kinghajj]

I recently became interested in Lisp, and while googling for pages on
in, I ran into L#. Though all Lisp dialects are very strange to me (as
I, like most programmers, come from an ALGOL-based-syntax background,)
but the syntax in L# is a bit easier. Maybe it's because L# uses .NET,
which I'm already familiar with. Like any new language, though, it has
given me a few frustrations in the past couple of days, but I'm
figuring things out nicely.

Anyways, thanks for this neat little language. Keep up the good work.

[wanorris]

I've worked my way through most of Practical Common Lisp now, and I've
really liked it. It's well written and engaging, and I especially
recommend it to anyone who starts learning Lisp with a fear in the back
of your mind that you are learning an academic language that's good for
things like AI and writing programs that write programs, but useful for
things that "normal" people might want to do. PCL is full of examples
for taking on normal programming tasks.

The other book I've just started reading is Paul Graham's other Lisp
book: On Lisp. If PCL is oriented toward helping you figure out how to
do things in Lisp that you could do in other languages, On Lisp is
oriented toward teaching you how to do things in Lisp that have no real
equivalent in many other languages -- functions that build functions,
macros, embedded languages, continuations, things like that. So far, it
seems like this will be an ideal second book on Lisp for people
interested in really mastering the language.

Happily, On Lisp is available as a free download in PDF or PostScript:

http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html

AN

[wanorris]

Oops. This should have been posted to a different thread. Sorry. I
reposted it to the proper thread. Please disregard this one, and I
apologize for the duplication.

AN