From: Jeff Dalton
Subject: Re: Physics with lisp ?
Date: 
Message-ID: <D2uAI5.C74@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
In article <··········@coils.cims.nyu.edu> ········@coils.cims.nyu.edu (Mark McConnell) writes:
>[Putman]
>> I think there are several characteristics of Lisp that drive would-be
>> [object-oriented] programmers like myself away. Especially when
>> coming from a simple system like FORTRAN.
>
>[me]
>It sounds at this point as if you've been exposed to many of the
>rumors about Lisp, things that were true in the 60s but are no longer
>true.  I'll go through these point by point.
>
>> Firstly there appears to be so many dialects of Lisp that I'm not sure
>> which to pick and it's not clear whether programmers bed-hop ...

>This was true as late as the late 80s.  But people got together to fix
>this very problem.  There is now one universal dialect of Lisp
>(setting Scheme aside for the moment), namely Common Lisp, which dates
>from about 1984.  

>Common Lisp is a huge language, because its implementors had to
>include all of 60s, 70s, and 80s Lisp--all slightly different in
>flavor.

All of that is somewhat misleading.

A lot of confusion is caused by talking about "dialects of Lisp".
It's better to think of Lisp as a family of (similar) languages.
Common Lisp is one of these languages.  The similarities and 
differences among them are similar to the similarities and
differences among languages in what we might call the "Algol
family" (at Algol 60 and 68, Pascal, and probably even C and
Ada).

Common Lisp is not the only current Lisp.  There's also at least
Scheme, EuLisp, and ILOG Talk (formerly Le Lisp).  Nor does Common
Lisp include all of 60s, 70s, and 80s Lisp.  It's not even entirely 
clear what "all of 60s, 70s, and 80s Lisp" means.  All of Lisp 1.5,
Lisp/VM, InterLisp, MacLisp, Portable Standard Lisp (PSL), Franz
Lisp, Lisp Machine Lisp, and more?  In any case, there are plenty 
of things in various other kinds of Lisp that are not in Common Lisp.

However, Common Lisp is reasonably well defined (it's now an ANSI
standard), and there are a number of implementations.  For most
people it's not too much problem to decide which variety of Lisp to
use, though not all will pick Common Lisp.  I'm not sure how much
"bed hopping" there is, but many people are just as likely to hop
to a non-Lisp (C++, say, or maybe ML or Perl) as to another kind
of Lisp.

-- jeff