Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer)
Subject: Re: ANSI CLISP: strengths vs. weaknesses?
Message-ID: <1996Oct10.100654.824@wavehh.hanse.de>
Organization: BSD User Group Hamburg
References: <slrn55n3fg.5p.psci@teleport.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 96 10:06:54 GMT
Lines: 36

psci@teleport.com (Brett) writes:

>As a programmer in various other languages (procedural), but a recent LISP
>onlooker, I am now considering LISP more seriously. And I am curious to
>know what other professionals see as the greatest weaknesses of LISP
>(various dialects). I see a lot about its advantages, but wish to peer
>deeper into this language. 

For Common Lisp, I'm unsatisfied mostly with CLOS. It's flexibility
greatly damages possible performance improvements and it is not very
integrated with the rest of the system. A dylan-like OO system with
sealing and standard types beeing normal classes would be nicer.

For Scheme, I found many useful implementations for specific tasks,
but not a universal implementation I could base long-running work
on. Maybe the Guile effort will help here. Performance-wise, I'm still
convinced that Scheme is slow by definition (while Common Lisp allows
to speed up things by declartions etc.).

>Is the code easily readable - code of others, esp? Or does it suffer from 
>problems similar to c's readability? Is it easily packaged into modules 
>of some sort? 

The syntax is one the best things of Lisp, IMHO. I really like to have
a uniform syntax without operator preferences, a syntax to play games
with and I really like to seperate things by space instead of random
other characters (in function argument lists, for example).

Martin


-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>  http://www.bik-gmbh.de/~cracauer
"As far as I'm concerned,  if something is so complicated that you can't ex-"
"plain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway"- Calvin
