Like the subject header asks, how common in CommonLisp ?
I'm asking at least two questions here:
1) how close are CommonLisp implementations are to each
other (i.e., how good of a standard is CommonLisp, and how
closely do implementations follow those standards,) and,
2) how many people (relatively speaking) are using
CommonLisp as opposed to other Lisp dialects ? (small,
good sized, lots...) And how will the numbers are expected
to be in the future ? (say, one, five, and ten years ?)
Regards,
-Ade.
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In article <······················@slate.mines.colorado.edu> ·······@slate.mines.colorado.edu (Ade Barkah) writes:
>Like the subject header asks, how common in CommonLisp ?
>I'm asking at least two questions here:
>
> 1) how close are CommonLisp implementations are to each
>other (i.e., how good of a standard is CommonLisp, and how
>closely do implementations follow those standards,) and,
Most Common Lisp (it's two words) implementations follow the de facto
standard (the original edition of the book "Common Lisp the Language", by
Guy L. Steele, Jr.) pretty well -- I'd guess at least 95% conformance. As
long as you stay within the language as described there, most programs are
pretty portable.
Things may get a little murky over the next few years, as the ANSI standard
for CL will be coming out, so some implementations will try to conform to
that while others will still conform to CLtL for a while, and still others
will have a mixture of both as they transition (similar to the situation in
the C world, where one must contend with ANSI C and K&R C).
> 2) how many people (relatively speaking) are using
>CommonLisp as opposed to other Lisp dialects ? (small,
>good sized, lots...) And how will the numbers are expected
>to be in the future ? (say, one, five, and ten years ?)
Common Lisp is probably the most popular non-embedded Lisp dialect. I
included the qualifier because Autodesk claims to be the largest Lisp
vendor, as their Autolisp extension language is a part of their popular
AutoCAD product; similarly, there are lots of people who use GNU Emacs
Lisp, either just to write simple .emacs files, or to write powerful Emacs
extension packages, and this could also be larger than the Common Lisp
community.
--
Barry Margolin
System Manager, Thinking Machines Corp.
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