I ran across a dialect called librep, targeted mainly for embedding and
the scripter of the sawfish WM a while back and I just started playing
around with it. What I've seen I like. It has macros like CL not
Scheme, and it seems to blend features very nicely, plus, it's quite
small. It had some really neat features like built-in
regular-expressions (I know they exist in several incarnations for CL),
and great process control features. It also allows for blending scopes
rather nicely with setq, defun, and define. It has a great reader (like
CLISPs), and bindings for MySQL and ORBit, all in one neat, compact
little package.
Anyone have any experience with it here? Any pet-hates, interesting
features?
--
Alexander Schofield
that's at:
http://librep.sourceforge.net/
Alexander Schofield wrote:
>
> I ran across a dialect called librep, targeted mainly for embedding and
> the scripter of the sawfish WM a while back and I just started playing
> around with it. What I've seen I like. It has macros like CL not
> Scheme, and it seems to blend features very nicely, plus, it's quite
> small. It had some really neat features like built-in
> regular-expressions (I know they exist in several incarnations for CL),
> and great process control features. It also allows for blending scopes
> rather nicely with setq, defun, and define. It has a great reader (like
> CLISPs), and bindings for MySQL and ORBit, all in one neat, compact
> little package.
>
> Anyone have any experience with it here? Any pet-hates, interesting
> features?
>
> --
> Alexander Schofield
--
Alexander Schofield
On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, Alexander Schofield wrote:
> I ran across a dialect called librep, targeted mainly for embedding
> and the scripter of the sawfish WM a while back and I just started
> playing around with it. What I've seen I like. It has macros like CL
> not Scheme, and it seems to blend features very nicely, plus, it's
> quite small. It had some really neat features like built-in
> regular-expressions (I know they exist in several incarnations for
> CL), and great process control features. It also allows for blending
> scopes rather nicely with setq, defun, and define. It has a great
> reader (like CLISPs), and bindings for MySQL and ORBit, all in one
> neat, compact little package.
>
> Anyone have any experience with it here? Any pet-hates, interesting
> features?
Having done a non-trivial quantity of work with it, trying to get
Sawfish to implement various features I wanted, as well as looking at it
as a general lisp-like scripting language, I found it to be generally
unpleasant to work with.
It's a dynamically scoped language, like Emacs Lisp, by default. The
lexical scoping is modeled directly on the scheme 'define' mechanism,
with it's irritating syntax.[1]
It's got a terribly small standard library of features, comparable to a
scheme, not a Common Lisp.
Overall I found it to feel like something that couldn't decide between
Emacs Lisp and Scheme, and it gave me a real dread that one day an Emacs
will adopt a scheme as it's scripting language. ;)
I wouldn't recommend it myself but your mileage may vary. My experiences
were mostly in the context of Sawfish and were unsuccessful, possibly as
a result of limitations of that environment and not the language.[2]
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] To me, of course.
[2] I don't think this is the case but due warning and all that...
--
The masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent.
The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.
-- Marshall McLuhan