Re: What is a lightweight language

[Tony Kimball <address@hidden>]

Quoth Paul Graham on Wednesday, 12 December:
: Mike raised this question at LL1. The answer is OS 
: connectivity and libraries, esp. string libraries.  People 
: need those to write actual programs. Common Lisp and Scheme 
: don't have them.  (Maybe some implementation thereof does, 
: but the standards don't).

Now Perl doesn't have XML support, but CPAN does, so Perl does too.
Why don't folks think of ww.cs.indiana.edy/scheme-repository like
CPAN?  I guess it boils down to a common dependency and distribution
tool, and the amortization of maintenance effort by virtue of
effective volunteerism and collaborative cooperation.  CPAN integrates
well, and Perl is extensible with low admin overhead.  Hypothesis: The
Scheme community consists of self-aggrandizers.  (Troll?  Whoops,
sorry.)

Having said that, I think that a lot of people suffer the slings and
arrows of trying to use Perl string regexps where structure matching,
unification are more appropriate, just as functional/applicative
programmers suffer from the lack of string matching and manipulation
that matches the concise simplicity of their list/tuple processing
idioms.  What languages manage to overload well, to combine these
functions in one syntax, which is both execution- and
expression-efficient?