Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[synthespian]

Jeremy H. Brown wrote:
(snip)
> 
> According to the "Revised(5) Report on the Algorithmic Language
> Scheme", "Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive
> dialect of the Lisp programming language..."  It's certainly not a
> dialect of Common Lisp, although it is one of CL's ancestors.
> 
> I'm sure if you do some web-groveling, you can find some substantial
> comparisons of the two; I personally think they have more in common
> than not.  Here are a few of the (arguably) notable differences:
> 
>                         Scheme          Common Lisp
> Philosophy              minimalism      comprehensiveness

(etc)
Hello --

   I would just like to point out that there's more choice out there in 
the Lisp family than Scheme - Common Lisp.
   In particular, I would like to mention ISLISP, which is an 
ISO-standard Lisp. Apparently, the story goes somewhat like this: when 
lispers went for an ANSI standard, they left out the Europeans and the 
Japanese - which were the other people heavily using Lisp at the time. 
Thus, ANSI Common Lisp was made all-American. So the people left out 
went for an ISO-standard Lisp.
   I don't know why this happened, I suspect (and I might be *very* 
wrong) it had something to do with competition way back when Lisp were 
aiming higher expectations market-wise (the French being very proud of 
Prolog :-) ).
   I have recently bumped into ISLISP. It is pretty good. It has full 
documentation and two usable implementations: a GPL TISL, and a free for 
non-commercial use OpenLisp (for now, at least, and I can't say for now 
if this will change - for the better).
   I don't have time to write a comparison table now, but let me just 
say that it mentions in its documentation the purpose of merging the 
perceived best features of "the family": "It attempts to bridge the gap 
between the various incompatible members of the Lisp family of languages 
(most notably Common Lisp, Eulisp, LeLisp, and Scheme) by focusing on 
standardizing those areas of widespread agreement." (check the URLs 
bellow, this quote from KMP's ISLISP site). However, it's not as big as 
Common Lisp (but some people mention that Common Lisp is a large as it 
is because it ported functionality that was from the Lisp Machines - but 
I might be wrong, what do I know about Lisp Machines - I wish...).
   ISLISP has objects, generic functions, defmacro and other good 
things. One of its stated aims was industry-use, not academia (that's 
from the spec).
   The TISL implementation is not so much developed as OpenLisp, but 
it's functional and GPLed. OpenLisp is lovely, and it beats the hell out 
of Scheme and Common Lisp on the *huge* number of platforms it compiles 
on. OpenLisp has compiled on over 60 platforms (yes! 16 to 64 bits!), 
and is actively ported today to over 20! So, it's pretty amazing, when 
you take into consideration that platform differences are an issue, 
particularly with Common Lisp implementations (CLISP being the most 
portable), when you need to interact with the OS. So, this is a 
non-issue solved on OpenLisp, just as it is solved on Python or Perl. It 
approaches Perl or Python in portability (or beats them, I dunno). 
OpenLisp's author, unfortunately, isn't much of a "marketing" person... 
I have tested it under win32 and NetBSD on Alpha.

   BTW, I bumped into OpenLisp because of a Lisp-friendly unix shell 
account provider,SDF Public Access Unix Network, a non-profit, that 
supports OpenLisp for CGI (also having the usual Python/Perl, etc).
   I mention ISLISP here because people are unaware of its existence, 
and it's quite a jewel, really.
   And let's be honest, who needs Python/Perl/Ruby when you have Lisp? ;-)

   Well, that's my 2c, get to know and enjoy ISLISP.

   Cheers,


   Henry


OpenLisp   by Eligis
http://christian.jullien.free.fr/
or http://www.eligis.com

TISL  GPL'd ISLISP form Tohoku University (Japan) (under active development)
http://www.ito.ecei.tohoku.ac.jp/TISL/index_j.html

ISLISP - Standards http://anubis.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG16/open/standard.html

More ISLISP documentation http://www.islisp.info/, this site maintained 
by Kent Pitman

ISLISP in Java http://cube.misto.cz/lisp/

TBK's links on ISLISP 
http://tkb.mpl.com/~tkb/links/tkb-links-2407134d0e19cfa20a5ebad3c416bc48.html