Re: What?

[Carl Gay <address@hidden>]

At 06:15 PM 8/11/2002 -0400, Rainer Joswig wrote:
>In article <bruce-8E0B11.09280612082002@copper.ipg.tsnz.net>,
> Bruce Hoult <bruce@hoult.org> wrote:
>
>> In article <joswig-CDF2A4.13101611082002@news.fu-berlin.de>,
>>  Rainer Joswig <joswig@lispmachine.de> wrote:
>> 
>> > Hehe, I hear the Gwydion Dylan people are adding more Lisp stuff
>> > to Dylan.
>> 
>> What are you thinking of here?
>
>Ask Andreas. He seems to have the plan. ;-)
>
>>  I'm certainly interested in seeing if 
>> there's anything that CL obviously does better than Dylan,
>
>Ah, there is so much - don't get me started.

I agree.  But I suspect it's not stuff that a C++ or Java programmer
would miss much.  (I could be wrong.)  Since one of the motivations
for Dylan was to make a language that would appeal to "the masses",
in some sense it doesn't matter too much that it leaves out "code is data" 
and some other powerful ideas.  Only Lispers will miss it, and even we
will only miss it occasionally.


>(defmethod sum-stream ((stream stream))
>  (let ((sum 0))
>    (loop for line = (read-line stream nil nil)
>          while line do (incf sum (parse-integer line)))
>    sum))
>
>This is another example where I like Lisp syntax much better.
>I want the binding to enclose the form - even if the enclosed
>form moves two spaces to the right (my Cinema Display makes
>even extremely widely formatted Lisp code possible. ;-) )
>I think the LET of Dylan is confusing. For me, indentation
>and grouping (with parentheses) are real features. ;-)

I don't think it's confusing, but I agree that it's nice to be able
to introduce bindings and scopes at the same time.  I just added
a "bind" macro to my dylan-basics library that does this...

bind (x :: <integer> = 0,
      y = "why")
  ...
end;