Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 06:59:40 01/24/04
Go up one level in this thread
On January 24, 2004 at 05:06:59, Tord Romstad wrote: >On January 23, 2004 at 21:50:58, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On January 23, 2004 at 12:44:47, Tord Romstad wrote: >>>Considering your apparently very limited knowledge of Lisp, I would >>>assume that this was in the very distant past. Otherwise, your >>>instructors and/or books must have been very poor. >> >>Remember who you are talking to. I was teaching computer science in 1970. There >>_was_ no book or instructor. :) However, that does not mean that I am not >>familiar with lisp. It just means that I don't use it much any longer. > >It seems to me that you haven't used it for a very long time, or at least that >you have >never studied the more advanced parts of ANSI Common Lisp. Your statements >about >Lisp might apply to Lisp dialects from the seventies, but they are totally off >the mark >for ANSI Common Lisp. I am not sure what "statements" you are referring to. If you find it easy to read someone else's Lisp code, then that's good. However, on many occasions I found myself having to work on something someone else wrote, I never found Lisp to be the easiest kind of program to work on. If you disagree, that's fine by me... > >>I've found myself to be adaptable enough to use the tool that best fits the >>situation. I simply commented that the overall syntax of Lisp sucks for casual >>code-reading. > >For *you*. I, and many other Lisp developers, feels completely at ease with >reading it. >Much more so than reading C and similar languages. OK... I am looking at this from a _broad_ background in various programming languages. If you mainly use Lisp, then obviously you will find it easier to read than others. Ask someone that can read multiple foreign languages and you will likely find they think one language is easier to read than the others. Ask a person that only reads one language and you get the expected result. > >And, as I have tried to tell you, you are not forced to use the s-expression >syntax. I didn't say you were. But the instant you change that, you change the language, which does not do a lot for _others_ reading your code. Sometimes it can help, sometimes not. IE I use a lot of macros in C to make the code easier to read, but the macros don't really change the syntax of the language, they look like function calls when they really are not... > >>Being easy to write does _not_ imply being easy to read. > >You're right. But being easy to write also does not imply being difficult to >read. > >>> >>>>However I would never >>>>say that ((((((((((x))))))))))) is easier to read than well-written C that >>>>is indented reasonably... >>> >>>Comparing well-written C to horrible Lisp is not quite fair, is it? >>>your "code" above couldn't possibly occur in any well-written Lisp >>>program. >>> >> >>multiple levels of parens occur in most any program I have ever worked on, >>whether I wrote it myself or not... that was the point. Humans don't easily >>parse parens and notice what matches what... > >The point is that you don't need to. I never parse parens and notice what >matches >what when reading or writing Lisp code. I don't look at the parens at all. >They >are there for the computer, not for me. You can't always do that, unfortunately. Unless you already _know_ what the code is doing. That was my point. > >>>I have thousands of hours of programming experience in C as well as Lisp. >>>I read, write, debug and edit Lisp code several times faster than C code >>>for all non-trivial programming tasks. And this is *not* because I am >>>good, rather the reverse. I am a mathematician, not a programmer. >>>Experts like you might be able to write complicated programs in low-level >>>languages like C. Lisp is a tool which makes it possible for >>>uneducated amateurs like myself to make the computer do really >>>amazing things. >> >>The same was said by Iverson about APL. It has its place. But you won't ever >>see a LISP O/S implementation, for example, and that is my primary interest as >>far as a programming topic goes. (nor will you see an APL one either). > >We have already seen Lisp O/S implementations (although I am too young to >remember them). We'll probably not see any new ones in the future, but that's >because there is no point in doing so, not because it cannot be done. > What O/S was ever implemented in Lisp? I'm certainly not aware of one, although that does not mean there was none. But no _serious_ O/S I have ever used had one line of Lisp... I don't believe I said it could _not_ be done. I believe I implied it _should not_ be done. >Tord
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