Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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Subject: Re: Common Lisp' dual name space
References: <38sffs$aav@edge.ercnet.com>
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Date: Mon, 31 Oct 1994 11:13:24 +0000
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In article <38sffs$aav@edge.ercnet.com>
           blake@edge.ercnet.com "Blake McBride" writes:

> it's _much_ cleaner with a single.  Also keep in mind that it's also
> theoretically possible to do _anything_ in streight C that can be done
> in lisp, therefore, if you think the cleanlyness doesn't matter than
> why even use lisp?

Because Lisp saves you time, as you don't have to build all the stuff
that C doesn't have? Since I don't have the source code to any C compilr,
and I wouldn't want it, anyway, I'll still prefer to use Lisp macros to
extend the language. That's far more important to me than name space
issues. I write "compilers" in Lisp far more often and with greater
ease than I do in any other language (except sometimes in Forth),
regardless if the Lisp dialect.

Cleanliness isn't an issue for me, either. How hard a task is, and
how much support I get from a language _is_ an issue. The following
mat be specific to me, but then, I can't speak for other Lisp users.

I recently begun compiling Lisp expressions into HTML pages. The
expressions don't describe Lisp code, they describe a heirarchy of
menus. The name space issue was never relevent to the development
of the "compiler" for the HTML "menu" pages.

If this is one of my typical uses for Lisp, which it could be, then
I spend more time crunching lists and strings than functions. If it
were more complex, it's possible that a function object might be used
at some point, but I'm hardly going to choose which Lisp I use based
on that.
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