Re: New book on Dylan?

To: info-dylan@ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: New book on Dylan?
From: brucehoult@pobox.com (Bruce Hoult)
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 00:45:02 -0400 (EDT)
Organization: The Internet Group Ltd
References: <38f42eeb@occy.pnc.com.au>
Xref: traf.lcs.mit.edu comp.lang.dylan:11820

In article <38f42eeb@occy.pnc.com.au>, Erica Mackenzie <erika@pnc.com.au> wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I'm trying to choose a book to learn Dylan programming from, and
> 'Dylan Programming' by Neal Feinberg et al seems to be highly recommended.
> I gather that the authors are/were Harlequin employees, so I'm
> wondering just how Wintel-oriented it was (I'll be programming on a
> PowerMac).

It's not Wintel-oriented.  I haven't actually tried everything, but I
think all the examples in the book should work fine on the Mac using Mindy
or d2c and most of them would probably work on MacMarlais (which is on the
CD I sent you) and the Apple Dylan Technology Release as well.

I'm not sure what your programming background is, but I'd probably
recommend starting with MacMarlais and/or Mindy because both provide very
fast think/edit/run/think/edit/run times.  MacMarlais in particular has a
very nice interactive environment for playing, but unfortunately it is a
bit out of date with respect to the language (e.g. the
forward-iteration-protocol is old-style) and some standard functions such
as format-out are missing.  Nothing that hard to work around if you ask
here, though  e.g. for format-out, just include:

define method format-out (s :: <string>, #rest args)
  format(standard-output(), s, args);
end method format-out;

Actually, does anyone know where to find the source for MacMarlais?  I've
only got binary releases :-(

-- Bruce

References:

New book on Dylan?

From: Erica Mackenzie <erika@pnc.com.au>