OFF-TOPIC:: Why Lisp is not my favorite programming language

[Stephen Horne]

On 08 Apr 2004 10:28:19 +0200, Jacek Generowicz
<jacek.generowicz at cern.ch> wrote:

>Stephen Horne <steve at ninereeds.fsnet.co.uk> writes:
>
>> and given the kind of metaprogramming possible in Lisp (which for
>> compilation to work, must imply just-in-time compilation at run
>> time)
>
>Why ?

I am led to believe that if you want to write any syntax in Lisp, you
can - you just need a library that understands it.

So if you feel like writing...

  (a := b + c)

You just write the library that understands infix operators,
precedence etc.

But the Lisp compiler itself doesn't understand that code. For it to
be handled, it must be translated (by the library) to Lisp code that
the compiler does understand, and that code must then be compiled.

Otherwise, the metaprogramming library is just an interpreter (barely
any different than writing "(+ 1 2)" in quotes and having a Lisp
interpreter written as a Python library, as really the only additional
thing it handles is tokenising), and your code implemented using
metaprogramming is not compiled. That would mean that what you can
write using metaprogramming is second class compared with what is
written using the standard Lisp facilities, which is a direct
contradiction of what I have been told right here in this group.

Or at least that is the impression I have - on the record of this
thread so far, I am confident that I will be proven wrong.


-- 
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk