Author: James Swafford
Date: 09:57:47 01/21/06
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On January 21, 2006 at 12:45:04, Tord Romstad wrote: >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. Maybe he was... but I'm not so sure. :) Either way after rereading what I wrote it sounds harsher than what I meant. > >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. This I didn't know! I did know that Lisp was not purely functional (Haskell is), but I didn't know it was multi-paradigm. Many programmers from the functional camp don't like Standard-ML because it has allowed imperative aspects to "pollute" the language. I wonder how much more they dislike Lisp. :) Anyway, thanks for the info. I learn something every day. -- James > >Most large-scale industrial Lisp programs are programmed in >a heavily object-oriented style. > >Tord
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