[ILUG] LISP & Prologue

[Smelly Pooh]

In reply to John P. Looney's flatulent wordings, 
> On Wed, Feb 02, 2000 at 02:44:35PM +0000, Smelly Pooh mentioned:
> > In reply to kevin lyda's flatulent wordings, 
> > > c works very much like the computer underneath it.  lisp is somewhat
> > > like functions in math but with some hacks that allow c-like
> > > programming.
> > Lisp takes very little out of C, it's only about 15 years older aswell
> 
>  And would have become *the* language for applications (leaving C for
> "systems implementation", only for the fact that everyone and their granny
> started producing commerical and incompatible versions that made the
> Commercial SysV vs. BSD split look like a marketing difference.

Then the ANSI Common Lisp standard came out in the early nineties which was
just a big compatibility hack that very few people like, and you have Scheme
which has a defacto standard (R5RS) and an IEEE standard which are pretty
similar, but the philosophy behind Scheme was to be as minimalist as possible
so you have a language with a near perfect core, but no standard libraries
beyond handling internal data and accessing files (they figured they'd let
people implement the rest whatever way they want) and now you have a hundred
Schemes (this number is only a slight over exageration) which are syntatically
and semantically identical, but with incompatible libraries starting that
whole split again.  It probably wouldn't have taken off as much as C did
anyway, for some reason most people have a serious aversion to Lisp's
bracketty notation, and functional programming and any language that wants to
be remotely successful these days mimic C/C++ syntax (e.g. PERL and Java)