······@world.std.com (Kent M Pitman) wrote:
> Because of the large amount of investment required to change Lisp
> in a way that compatibly runs old programs but still accomodates new
> programs, Lisp changes slowly. However, there does seem to be motion
> toward integrating Lisp through modern databases, object interfaces,
> and even DLLs.
As you're the editor - or at least that's my impression - of ISLisp,
I wonder whether you'd comment a bit on its perspective? (Assuming it
has any future; some people don't seem to like it, but I still think
there would be use for a small Lisp which could be statically compiled
and embedded into "traditional" programs/libraries - and ISLisp might
be at least a starting point.) Do you expect semantic changes beyond
working draft 20? Is there still hope that some kind of top-level name
space management (modules, packages, whatever) is introduced? What about
fixnums or similar optimization facilities, a reliable way for macros
to parse e.g. :rest, and to recognize unnamed symbols, and the option to
pass some name to gensym for a potential debugger, or print-object as a
generic function - to name just a few concerns wrt. goals claimed in the
introduction? (More detailed criticism is available on request, in case
there's still movement in this area and someone isn't too busy and/or
bored to care about these issues ;-)
Somehow it seems lots of people even in the Lisp community are seeing
macros mostly as tools to provide syntactic sugar (thus Dylan's departure
from s-expressions and fully expressive macros). Very sad, IMO.
> In the future, I hope the choice of what language people program in
> will become more of a private choice,
Well, except for isolated programmers, I doubt it. Hardly any company
would risk being left with code in some language which nobody of their
employees is able to maintain (and even more than one single language
is frequently already a problem). In many cases this may be sad from a
technical viewpoint, but I doubt that technology will cause significant
changes to such commercial problems (hmm, this sounds like yet another
argument for overthrowing capitalism).
Of course, at home I can already use almost every language which I find
interesting - assuming there's some implementation available (frequently
the case for Linux/x86), or I can build one with reasonable effort; but
I guess that wasn't primarily what you had in mind ;-)
> and that the focus will be on
> interface points between programming languages, just as in the past
> the focus has been on the internals of objects being insulated and
> only the points of communication among objects were important.
At least we can hope that the euphory for Java may perhaps improve some
system interfaces for garbage-collected languages. At this time, I think
that's the most severe _technical_ hindrance for multi-language usage
on modern platforms, since the rest can usually be solved with reasonable
effort by thin interfaces, without hurting the more flexible languages
(like Lisp) too badly.
-- Marc Wachowitz <··@ipx2.rz.uni-mannheim.de>