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Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: Tom Breton <t...@world.std.com>
Date: 2000/03/27
Subject: Re: can lisp do what perl does easily?
Matt Curtin <cmcur...@interhack.net> writes: I agree very much with what Matt said. There are just a few tiny things. > >>>>> On Mon, 27 Mar 2000 03:41:04 GMT, > >>>>> ; ; ; h e l m e r . . . <assembl...@t-three.com> said: > h> If I learn lisp well will I be able to do what people do with > Some things that would help Lisp in its comparisons with Perl: Codex. [snip more good ones] > o Standardized support for text-whackage a la Perl's patterns (as Now here's something I hope Lisp doesn't acquire. Too often, eg with > they're properly called, since they're actually regular exprssion > extensions). I know that CLISP offers regexp support, but not all > Lisps do it. format strings, file paths, the loop facility, Lisp has forgotten its own elegance and grabbed at some byzantine, syntax-heavy notation just because other languages used it. Lisp has (not part of the X3J13 standard) an alternative to regexes: > People who will defend Lisp on many of these counts will say "get a On this ng, you're sure to get a few catcalls over that, so let me > good commercial environment". That's fine and dandy, but if I, as a > fan of Lisp, am not willing to plonk down some ridiculously huge > amount of money on a "good commercial environment", why should we > expect anyone to do that? I don't even know how much money we're > talking about here; several months ago, I mailed Franz to ask about > pricing. I never heard anything more than an auto-ACK. pre-emptively say, you're absolutely rite. > I will not share in the Perl-bashing that many Lispers enjoy, as Perl Well, intuitive because familiar. But I'd keep the word "annoying". > that cannot be read is almost always the fault of the programmer, not > of Perl itself. People who are not familiar with the "Unix tools" > find Perl's syntax strange and annoying. Understanding sed, awk, > troff, C, shell, and friends, I can tell you that I find Perl's syntax > to be quite intuitive. Usually. Figuring out how many $'s are needed, whether you should change $ to @, whether lists have flattened sublists, and so forth, sorry, all that's a royal pain even if it saves typing a few characters. IMO of course. > o Perl cannot (easily) be used interactively. One fakes it with the Ouch. I remember that now. > debugger. This is kind of annoying, as I like to write code by > testing code snippets interactively and then adding them to my > source file as I go. > So whether Perl or Lisp will work better for you will depend on the -- > problem at hand and its criteria for success. If you know Lisp well, > you should be able to do essentially any job. If you know Perl well, > you should be able to do essentially any job. Each has its strengths > and weaknesses. It's your job as a programmer to use the strengths > and avoid the weaknesses. Tom Breton, http://world.std.com/~tob Not using "gh" since 1997. http://world.std.com/~tob/ugh-free.html Rethink some Lisp features, http://world.std.com/~tob/rethink-lisp/index.html You must Sign in before you can post messages.
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