Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 09:45:04 01/21/06
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On January 21, 2006 at 11:49:03, James Swafford wrote: >On January 21, 2006 at 02:02:25, Dann Corbit wrote: > >>Who wants a chess engine consisting almost entirely of parenthesis? > >Surely you can do better than "the syntax sucks." I am pretty sure Dann was joking. A similar joke about C would be to say that nobody would want a chess engine consisting almost entirely of semicolons, asterisks and curly braces. Most experienced Lispers consider the syntax to be one of the major *strengths* of Lisp, by the way. There has been a few attempts to construct Lisp dialects with a more mainstream syntax (Dylan is probably the most widespread these days), but they have never caught on. >Another con: nobody wants to write an entire engine in a functional >style. I don't think the model fits very well for chess engines. >I'd much rather write the framework in an imperative way (I like OO), >and possibly construct some algorithms here and there in a functional >style. This is a very common misconception: Unlike Haskell, Lisp is not a functional language, but a multi-paradigm language. It supports functional programming, but also imperative programming, object-oriented programming and declarative programming, and is not heavily biased towards either of them. In fact, many Lisp programmers consider using functional programming where more straightforward approaches are possible to be very poor style. Most large-scale industrial Lisp programs are programmed in a heavily object-oriented style. Tord
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