[rescue] book score

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 03:59:20PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Apr 2004, Bill Bradford wrote:
> 
> > Local bookstore at lunch today, first edition, "Common Lisp:  the Language"
> > by Steele.  "This isnt marked, how much?"  "Oh, four bucks?"  "SOLD".
> 
> I think I paid $6 at Half-Price for the 1st edition and $8 for the 2nd
> edition.  The difference in size between the two is astounding.  They're
> also an excellent read.
> 
> I haven't really found a LISP environment I like, but I have to pimp
> DrScheme for Scheme. ;)

I like DrScheme.  It seems to be more portable than most of the smaller
lighter ones I've tried.  I run it on Linux, Solaris, and Irix.

I do like STk as well.  Mainly because it has a light GUI system.  The
latest version uses GTK.  I don't know if they support windows with the
latest version yet.  The older version I first started using ran quite
nicely on both linux and windows.  I haven't tried and version on Irix
yet. 

Oh, I also do scripting in guile to a small extent.  It seems to be
faster for that than other schemes.  I keep meaning to look into scsh
for that instead.

As to lisp, I mostly use SBCL with the generic emacs interface.  I keep
meaning to upgrade to using the SLIME interface.  On Irix I use CMUCL
(as there is no Irix port of SBCL yet).  On PPC I might consider trying
OpenMCL (which offers native threads, unlike the others) in addition to
SBCL. 

The nice thing though is that most of the interesteding stuff out there
is compabitible with all of CMUCL, SBCL, OpenMCL, CLISP, and several
commercial alternatives.  I don't actually make any use of that
interesting stuff though.  I keep meaning to try mcclim, portable aserve,
and the perl regex library (which is both more compatible with perl than
perl is, and faster).

But, I'm in no way a major functional hacker of any sort.  I've managed
to do a few interesting pieces of code in scheme and lisp (some data
management and mangling stuff, a small database, and some math stuff),
but nothing major.  My current project is trying to rewrite a packet
parser from C to common lisp.  I would like to then try and marry it to
a GUI frontend written with McCLIM.  I think my chances of every really
getting the GUI working for this project are fairly slim though.  I'm
just not finding enough time to do it.

Frankly, the two things I find the most frustrating are the difficulty
of building a stand alone command line program (thus why I use guile as
shell scripting system), and the difficulty in doing anything GUI.