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Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

Edi Weitz edi at agharta.de
Fri Oct 10 04:59:13 EDT 2003 
On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 23:15:17 GMT, "Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> wrote:

> My primary machine is Mac OS X.  I always got frustrated getting
> fonts, sound, and movies working under the various Linux-based
> distributions, and I suspect there are the same problems with
> BSD-based distributions.

Although I've been using Linux and/or FreeBSD since about 1999 I
understand what you mean. It's still much too hard to set up a machine
if you just want to get your work done and don't like fiddling with
the OS internals.

But there are a couple of free Common Lisps available for Mac OS X -
OpenMCL, CLISP, SBCL, ECL, maybe more. (Plus the trial versions of
MCL, AllegroCL and LispWorks the latter of which has a fantastic
cross-platform GUI toolkit.) What's missing is someone who integrates
these Lisps and the available packages with something like Fink to
make OS X as convenient as Debian as far as Lisp is concerned. I think
this wouldn't be too hard - AFAIK Fink uses the same package format -
but somebody's gotta do the work. (If someone's willing to donate an
iBook or PowerBook to me I'll do it... :)

Just to show you that the situation isn't as bleak as you might think
here's the list of Debian packages maintained by Kevin Rosenberg:

  <http://qa.debian.org/developer.php/developer.php?gpg_key=C4A3823E>

That's more than 110 and almost all of them are for Common Lisp. Plus,
there are Common Lisp packages maintained by other people, of
course. Still far less than what can be found on CPAN but a very good
base to start with. (And who needs Lingua::Romana::Perligata anyway?
Pardon me that all my examples are for Perl but I'm much more familiar
with Perl than with Python.)

> No one has told me they would hire me for contract work "if only you
> were a Lisp programmer."

No one has told me either. But I've had a lot of contract work in
Common Lisp since I started with it in 2000. If I were always waiting
for someone to tell me which language to use I'd probably be stuck
with Java, PHP, and Visual Basic forever. Yuck!

> > 3. Run around complaining that you can't use Lisp because a certain
> >    combination of features is not available for free. We have far too
> >    many of these guys on c.l.l.
> 
> Technically I'm cross-posting from c.l.py.  And I actually complain
> for other reasons.  ;)

Yes, I wasn't talking about you in particular.

> So far I've made ... 4(?) half-hearted attempts at learning Lisp.

Next time try it wholeheartedly... :)

> *sigh*.  Another package that doesn't (err, won't) work on my Mac.

Same answer as above. The CD is based on SBCL so it should be possible
to do something similar for OS X (should even be easier in theory
because you don't need the Knoppix stuff for HW detection). It's just
that someone has to do it...

Cheers,
Edi.
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