Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!ists!yunexus!oz
From: oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Message-ID: <20709@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Date: 18 Jan 91 16:19:15 GMT
References: <127724@linus.mitre.org> <5569@turquoise.UUCP> <17550@ists.ists.ca>
Sender: news@yunexus.YorkU.CA
Organization: York U. Communications Research & Development
Lines: 31

In article <17550@ists.ists.ca> mike@apl.ists.ca (Mike Clarkson) writes:

>As for being smaller, it depends on what you mean by smaller. 

Sure. It all depends. I, for example, like this definition: "smaller" as
it relates to the time it takes an average 16-year-old highschool student
with a Mac Classic and a C compiler to implement the entire language. ;-)

>But bear in mind that the Scheme standard does not define
>many things lisp programmers consider essential, such as macros.

That depends what you mean by essential. If I were to take some of the
discussion in this newsgroup as a crude measure, I would probably conclude
that anything in the silver book is "essential", with all that implies.
As for macros, the issue has never been "doing it" but rather, "doing it
right", just to re-iterate in case this point hasn't been made enough many
times. A macro facility is typically included in just about every
implementation of the language, and most of those also support a more
unified extend-syntax (dbyvig) facility. A proposal for a very powerful
and hygenic macro facility is being completed on for some edition of the
revised report.

> MIT makes probably the most complete Scheme working environment, ...

which depends on what you mean by a most complete working environment,
which turns out to change in some circles just about every week. ;-)

... oz
---
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that is very little. -- Dan Rather    | UUCP: utzoo/utai!yunexus!oz