On Mon, 2003-11-17 at 08:11, Dan Sugalski wrote: > On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Mike Newhall wrote: > > > > > LISP-like languages aren't attractive solely for implementation > > reasons, I think; LISP wins for ease of programming. > > Well... maybe, but not in my experience. On the projects I've worked on > with embedded LISP-like languages we all swore with some regularity at the > languages *because* of their inherent LISP-y nature. Writing the code was > more of a headache and hassle, and went more slowly than it would've in > the embedding language. We used them, though, because there was no > alternative. We needed the embedded, dynamic language and had only a > little bit of I-space (even with overlays) to throw at the problem. How much easier is it really to implement a Lisp like language? Certainly lexing and parsing is easier, but with tools like lex/yacc and a sane syntax an infix language can be pretty lightweight and simple to implement too. Once you get to an AST the rest is all more or less the same, right? A real DSL also seems likely to benefit from some syntactic sugar, so s-expr syntax isn't necessarily a win from the user's point of view, especially given that the casual users of a interactive, scripting-style DSL are probably not going to like entering s-exprs interactively. There's a discussion going on on the Bay Area Lispniks list on the pros and cons of s-expr syntax. It seems to me that the only really killer application of s-exprs is in Lisp-style procedural macros, but perhaps my enlightenment is just around the corner. -- Miles Egan <miles@caddr.com>
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part