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merits of Lisp vs Python

greg greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Dec 18 23:01:23 EST 2006 
Bill Atkins wrote:
> This is not a response to any particular post, but rather to the
> general argument that macros are not as useful as we Lispers claim.
> 
> Here is a fairly complete GUI RSS reader in 90 lines of Lisp

For comparison, here's how something with a similar
API might be used from Python.

class RSSInterface(Interface):

   def __init__(self):
     Interface.__init__(self,
       panes = [
         TextInput('url_pane',
           title = 'Feed URL:',
           callback = 'add_feed',
           callback_type = 'interface'),
         PushButton('add',
           text = 'Add Feed',
           callback = 'add_feed',
           callback_type = 'interface'),
         PushButton('refresh',
           text = 'Refresh All',
           callback = 'refresh_feeds',
           callback_type = 'interface'),
         PushButton('delete',
           text = 'Delete Feed',
           callback = 'delete_feed',
           callback_type = 'interface'),
         TreeView('tree',
           visible_min_width = ('character', 84),
           visible_min_height = ('character', 40),
           action_callback = 'browse_item',
           callback_type = 'item_interface',
           expandp_function = lambda: True, # not sure how best to translate
           children_function = 'tree_item_children',
           print_function = 'tree_item_string')
         ],
       layouts = [
         ColumnLayout('main', ('top', 'tree')),
         RowLayout('top', ('url_pane', 'add', 'refresh', 'delete'))
         ],
       title = 'Barebones RSS Reader v1.0')
     self.channels = [
       parse_rss_from_url(url) for url in [
         'http://planet.lisp.org/rss20.xml',
         'http://feeds.theonion.com/theonion/daily']]

   def add_feed(self):
     ...

   def delete_feed(self):
     ...

   # etc.

--
Greg
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