[rescue] fans fans fans...

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 02:46:13PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> > OK.  First, I recommend Scheme over Lisp.  I think it gets the point
> > across a lot faster than lisp does, and I think it is pretty easy to
> > switch back and forth, and the best thing I've found for learning
> > either is for scheme.
> 
>   What are the differences?  I know they're related in some way but
> I'm not sure how.  Is it easy to summarize?

OK, one of the most power features of the languages are the macros.
Over time, lisp went from being a simple thing to being a huge
standard with so many macros that it was easy to view it as just
another procedural programming language, and implementations were
huge, etc, etc.

So, a group of people went of and created Scheme with the intent of
going back to roots, and being purer still.  Thus, while there are
larger schemes (like MIT Scheme, which I didn't mention on the list
since I can't figure out why it is worth 20 megs of disk space),
mostly schemes are small and they keep you focussed on what it means
to be doing functional programming.

Otherwise, most of the differences at first glance just appear to be
differences in syntax and standard libraries that one would think
could be smoothed away in a few macros and functions (and in fact they
can be.  One scheme environment I've played with is a just a very
small common lisp package).  For people more advanced than me,
apparently there are bigger differences.

> > As to starting environment, guile seems pretty decent.  It isn't
> > something you would want to use professionally much, but it has a lot
> > of bindings available for it, which are pretty much needed if you want
> > to do real world stuff.  Plus, it is available on just about every
> > platform with a GNU toolkit, so you can use it on whatever you want.
> 
>   I already have guile (the EDA package that I use requires it) so
> perhaps I'll start with that.
> 
>   Cool.  Thanks for the recommendations!  Of course you know, when I
> actually get started, I'll probably flood your mailbox with dumb
> questions. ;)

I'll see what I can do to answer them.  I still do a lot of
floundering myself.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd