Be gentle with me....

[William Tanksley]

On 8 Dec 1999 03:14:33 GMT, Samuel A. Falvo II wrote:
>In article <slrn84rc90.1do.neelk at brick.cswv.com>, Neel Krishnaswami wrote:

>>and therefore proves by example that Lisp is not the sole right way to
>>design a language. He goes on to say that he's a bit worried by the
>>fact that it's the *only* counterexample he has found.... :)

>Lisp and Forth are indeed diabolical opposites.

I'm pretty sure that Sam meant "diametrical", but one has to admit that
the image conjured up by his accidental choice is as meaningful as it is
amusing.

Lisp and Forth, the gruesome twosome.

>What I find ironic is that
>it is the opposite nature of the two languages which makes them immensely
>similar to each other.  For instance, because Forth environments generally
>don't have garbage collection (some do have conservative collectors), you
>tend to write your code to be more memory concious(sp?) than you would under
>Lisp.  What takes almost no memory to do in Forth would take up triple the
>memory normally used in Lisp, and vice versa.

Um...  Sam's saying that Forth code is very memory-efficient.  True.  It's
also notable that Forth code very rarely explicitly calls any memory
management functions; it achives through brute simplicity what Lisp
achieved through brute force.

>Trivia: The creator of Forth studied under the creator of Lisp, and are
>reportedly very good friends.  I also find it interesting to see the people
>in comp.lang.lisp throw their noses up at almost any language on the planet.
>Yet, when one person says they're familiar with Forth, they welcome them
>with warm hearts.

Agreed.  I like Lisp.

>Samuel A. Falvo II

-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley, in hoc signo hack