NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/comp/lang/lisp/3379

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-27 | 3.5 KB

Xref: sparky comp.lang.lisp:3379 comp.lang.scheme:2979
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme
Path: sparky!uunet!gumby!yale!mintaka.lcs.mit.edu!zurich.ai.mit.edu!jaffer
From: [e-mail] (Aubrey Jaffer)
Subject: Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?
In-Reply-To: [e-mail]'s message of Wed, 27 Jan 1993 17:59:35 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab.
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 19:32:29 GMT
Lines: 64

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Kardan Kaveh) writes:

   In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Bill Vrotney) writes:

   ...
   Every once in a while this thread pops up, with people lamenting over the
   size of Common Lisp.  Usually, someone (me, in this instance) will point out
   that there is a small, standardized (IEEE) lisp around: Scheme.

   I am crossposting this to comp.lang.scheme because I feel the point made above
   applies to some extent to scheme as well.

   Although the technical side of scheme has been very well handled, I find the
   lack of scheme in the marketplace quite disturbing.  According to the FAQ,
   there is only _one_ commercial implementation of scheme running on UNIX
   workstations (Chez Scheme).

I sell SCM, which runs on UNIX workstations, on MSDOS floppy disks.
This is as portable a medium as you are likely to find for UNIX
workstations.  However, I am willing to put it on another format.  The
FAQ probably does not mention me as a commercial vendor because SCM is
also availble via FTP.

   There are several free implementations around, but all are either toy
   implementations or are concerned with being an "extestion language" for
   applications written in C.

SCM was written to be the base of a symbolic algebra program written
in R4RS Scheme.

   As a result they have no compilers and no development environments.

If you are working on Unix workstations then there is no problem.
Emacs + psd1.0 provides source code single stepping and breakpointing,
code formatting and send-defun.  SCM (through SLIB) provides trace and
untrace.  I find this a potent combination.

The Hobbit Compiler (by Tanel Tammet) for SCM is in alpha test
and should be ready soon.  However, as SCM runs only 15 times slower
than hand crafted C code (on most machines) and loads very quickly,
the lack of the compiler has not hampered my development efforts.

   No foreign-function interface, for one.

There are directions for adding foreign-functions to SCM in code.doc
in the distribution.  Many people have done so.  So I think it is not
too difficult.

   It can be argued that academia has done its job in presenting us with
   extremely elegant standards (R4RS and IEEE), but the commercial sector has
   dropped the ball.

Perhaps if I charged more, I would be taken more seriously.  But
consider this:  for the price of a "commercial" implementation
(n x $1000) you could hire me or someone else to add a substantial
amount of stuff to SCM.

Some things which could be added to SCM are:
  Profiling (how much time spent in each routine)
  Dynamic Linking (There is a GNU package which does this on Unix
    systems and Carrette has also suggested a fairly portable method)
  Editor (buffers + GNU search + curses)
  String Ports (someone has sent me code for this but I haven't had
    time to integrate it)