From: Brandon J. Van Every
Subject: Native Lisp code in the CAD market
Date: 
Message-ID: <nSxoe.15734$w21.4866@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net>
I've been having a debate about the CAD market with a Pythonista friend 
of mine.  My friend's point of view seems to be that because so many 
developers do the C++-and-scripting-language-shuffle, that this must be 
how Lisp is getting used too.  Basically, that everybody must be doing 
things the way he has to do them in Python.  I am thinking, there are 
plenty of native Lisp compilers, and lots more 3D graphics engineering 
expertise in the CAD realm than in, say, the game industry.  For certain 
important classes of 3D graphics problems, at any rate.  So my point is, 
I'd hazard a guess that a lot of CAD is built with Lisp native code.  Am 
I correct?  Is that a fairly common industry practice?  Or do Lisp 
developers end up doing what everyone else does, which is implement the 
guts in C++ and then write a scripty HLL layer on top of it?

-- 
Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

When no one else sells courage, supply and demand take hold.

From: Jim
Subject: Re: Native Lisp code in the CAD market
Date: 
Message-ID: <Vdppe.7546$qr.2766@fed1read06>
A datapoint for your intuition is that AutoCAD (one of the most popular 
3D CAD applications) is done in Lisp (AutoLisp naturally).  You'll find 
a ton of specialized AutoLisp packages (just like the plethora of 
packages in ELisp for emacs).  But I don't know what kind of Lisp 
implementation AutoCAD uses.

Jim

Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> I've been having a debate about the CAD market with a Pythonista friend 
> of mine.  My friend's point of view seems to be that because so many 
> developers do the C++-and-scripting-language-shuffle, that this must be 
> how Lisp is getting used too.  Basically, that everybody must be doing 
> things the way he has to do them in Python.  I am thinking, there are 
> plenty of native Lisp compilers, and lots more 3D graphics engineering 
> expertise in the CAD realm than in, say, the game industry.  For certain 
> important classes of 3D graphics problems, at any rate.  So my point is, 
> I'd hazard a guess that a lot of CAD is built with Lisp native code.  Am 
> I correct?  Is that a fairly common industry practice?  Or do Lisp 
> developers end up doing what everyone else does, which is implement the 
> guts in C++ and then write a scripty HLL layer on top of it?
> 
From: jonathon
Subject: Re: Native Lisp code in the CAD market
Date: 
Message-ID: <1118195978.159584.100950@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
Jim wrote:
> A datapoint for your intuition is that AutoCAD (one of the most popular
> 3D CAD applications) is done in Lisp (AutoLisp naturally).  You'll find
> a ton of specialized AutoLisp packages (just like the plethora of
> packages in ELisp for emacs).  But I don't know what kind of Lisp
> implementation AutoCAD uses.

As far as the guts of AutoCAD, I don't know.  I could imagine a C
drawing engine with Lisp on top, but I'm not sure.

I read somewhere that AutoLisp is very watered down from regular Lisp,
but still quite powerful as a scripting language.  I remember getting
interested in Lisp during my engineering graphics course when I had to
beg the prof to let me borrow the AutoLisp manual for a while.  It's
been a long time, but I finally decided to learn Lisp.

I also heard that AutoCAD has/had switched/added VB as a scripting
language.  That's when the first AutoCAD virus appeared.  :-)

Where I work we switched to Pro-E.  It has a C-like scripting language.
From: Frank Buss
Subject: Re: Native Lisp code in the CAD market
Date: 
Message-ID: <1k75tqu6zazhm$.ckex0v9l3z5m.dlg@40tude.net>
Jim wrote:

> But I don't know what kind of Lisp 
> implementation AutoCAD uses.

quoting http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/autocad/lisp/ :

| AutoLISP is the scripting language for AutoCAD by Autodesk, a very crippled 
| dynamic Lisp-1, based on very early xlisp sources 

| To keep the language simple, some typical features such as macros, vectors, 
| structs, destructive operations and objects were left out. 

-- 
Frank Bu�, ··@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de