Talk:Lisp (programming language)/Archive 1

message: I'm considering adding a section listing the arguments put forth by proponents and opponents of Lisp.  Would this be useful, or would it probably just spark a flamefest? --Piquan 10:29, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Such a section would be useful, and there won't be a flamefest if the section describes the arguments, and stays scrupulously clear of trying to endorse any. If I can't tell from reading it whether you personally like or hate Lisp, then the material is properly neutral.  --Stan 14:58, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pro and Con (That is, criticism) sections 

message: Does anyone know of any statistics about the number of users of different Lisps? I'd like to know such things as:
* Are there more CL-ers or more Schemers?
* Which Scheme is the most popular?
* How many people use CL vs. how many people use the most popular Scheme?
--Ryguasu 19:02, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I've removed this section for discussion. Despite the conversation above, it really isn't clear to me what was originally meant by it, and it's been pointed out as misleading. --FOo 00:06, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lisp "popularity contests"? 

message: While S-expressions are almost universally a sign of a Lisp, not all Lisps have sexp based syntax. The most notable member of this group is Dylan.
:Note that Dylan did have S-expressions for a while, but the syntax was modified in later revs of the language. Other examples of Lisp languages which have non-S-expression syntax are A-language, LISP 2, EL1, CLISP (not the modern implementation of CL, but "Conversational LISP" implemented in Interlisp using DWIM functionality), MLISP, and CGOL. See Gabriel and Steele's article The Evolution of Lisp for details on these "Algol-style" syntax alternatives for Lisp, and some cogent argumentation for why they never caught on in the Lisp world. — Ts'éiyoosh 00:15, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dylan 

message: Please remove the whole "Shared structure" section.   It's completely false, as demonstrated in c2-wiki-style!!  [Which is inappropriate on Wikipedia in my experience]
Thank you.  --80.98.243.176 03:08, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Smells to me like you're trolling. But just in case -- your line (setq foo (list 'a 'b 'goose)) is where the problem is. The idea is to replace part of the structure of foo, not to replace foo. (setf (third foo) 'goose) would do it. --FOo 03:57, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shared structure 

message: There are two links to GNU Lisps. What is the difference between the two implemenations?
* http://www.clisp.org/ – GNU CLISP – a portable (Unix, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X) ANSI Common Lisp implementation
* http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl – a GNU cross-platform Common Lisp implementation
:This question would be better on one of their mailing lists, or comp.lang.lisp, but I'll give you a quick overview.  They're entirely different implementations.  If memory serves (not always a guarantee), GCL was the first Common Lisp implementation that was part of the GNU project, and CLISP was originally an independant project.  GCL stagnated for a while, and wasn't brought up to the ANSI standard (which was written after GCL was started), and CLISP was made part of GNU.  Now GCL development is active again.
:Internally, they're very different.  For example, while GCL dispatches through the C compiler to compile to native code, while CLISP uses an internal byte-code compiler.  CLISP seems to be one of the more popular free Lisp implementations, from watching comp.lang.lisp, while GCL is less often seen. --Piquan 00:12, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  GNU Lisp 

message: Should we move the "Quotes" section to Wikiquotes? Or leave it on the main article page? 
Singingwolfboy 22:35, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quotes 

message: made some rather negative edits on this article.  Coincidentally he made similar edits on Scheme programming language.  See his edit of 20:34, 2 October 2005 and my response on the talk page.  He seems to have some kind of bee in his bonnet about the lisp family, particular those dratted parentheses. :) --Tony SidawayTalk 21:28, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Contributions of [[User:24.128.49.163|24.128.49.163]]

message: It would be nice if somebody could add some remarks about association lists and refer to Association_list#Lisp. Some notes how to use arrays and hash tables would be nice as well. Hirzel 12:44, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Association lists

message: In the article, ML is listed as an example of a pure functional language. This is incorrect, according to what I know of ML as well as the ML page. However, I don't feel quite familiar enough with the context in this article to try and fix it myself. Can someone who knows what they are doing please fix it? SpectrumDT 19:16, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  ML is impure 

message: I'm currently working on my own Lisp interpretter (a bit unusual though - multithreaded). I've been reading the CLISP implementation notes, and CLISP seems to have two stacks, STACK and SP. Can anyone explain why are there two stacks? What is the difference between them? Is it enough to have a stack of call frames in each thread, so that every call frame has it's own local stack? - Phraine
: This would much better be asked on comp.lang.lisp.  But look at what gets put on each stack - is one a Lisp-pointer-only stack and the other a C-language control stack, or ... ? Ari 02:12, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Virtual machine implementation