Why don't people like lisp?

[Joe Marshall]

"Rainer Deyke" <rainerd at eldwood.com> writes:

> Peter Seibel wrote:
>> But--and this is the bit I think you may have missed--if that's *not*
>> what you want you don't use WITH-OPEN-FILE. Lisp also provides OPEN
>> and CLOSE, that act as you'd expect and allow you to explicitly
>> control the lifetime of the file stream.
>
> Which leads us back to having to manually close files.
>
> I DON'T want to manually close files.  I DON'T want to deal with the
> limitations of with-open-file.  And, here's the important bit, I DON'T WANT
> TO COMBINE OR CHOOSE BETWEEN THESE TWO METHODS, BOTH OF WHICH ARE FLAWED.

Let me see if I get this:  

  1.  You don't want to tell the computer when you are done with the
      file.

  2.  But the computer shouldn't wait until it can prove you are done
      to close the file.

  3.  And you definitely are opposed to the idea of letting the
      computer figure it out in general, but giving it hints when
      it is important that it be prompt.

Do you want to tell the computer the file name, or should it read your
mind on that as well?