In article <···················@kimac1.informatik.uni-hamburg.de>, ······@informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Rainer Joswig) writes:
|> > >I think the real reason Lisp isn't widely used is because Lisp
|> > >developers insist on providing incredibly fancy, interactive "Lisp
|> > >worlds" which are nearly an operating system unto themselves.
|> > >Consequently, most Lisp implementations fit very poorly into the rest
|> > >of the platform on which they run.
|>
|> Which platforms did he mean? Unix, Unix, Unix and what else?
I have run Lisp under UNIX (several versions), CP/M, AppleDOS, MS-DOS,
Windows, some bizarre DG OS, VMS, ITS, MacOS, and Tenex, in addition to
the Lisp machine. Other people are running it also on OS/2, Windows
NT, and lots of other operating systems.
On all platforms where I tried it, except the Lisp machine, it was
comparatively cumbersome to access OS services (other than the kind
of facilities that are standardized in the language) from Lisp.
Furthermore, if there were several implementations of Lisp running
on the same platform, they never agreed on how OS services were
to be accessed.
That's in stark contrast to C/C++, which tries to provide access to
all OS services and most libraries on the system. Often, that
kind of access is also somewhat independent of the particular
implementation of C/C++ that you are trying to use on that platform.
|Lisp systems should compete with development enviroments like
|Turbo C, Think C++, Visual Basic, ... That's where the people
|are. Not on these obscure Unix boxes.
Sure, but the problems are not all that different.
Thomas.