Advantages of newLISP compared with other scripting tools?

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cormullion
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Advantages of newLISP compared with other scripting tools?

Post by cormullion »

I'd be interested in your opinions as to what you think are the main benefits of newLISP compared with some of the other mainstream scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby)... I can certainly see the benefits of newLISP over old LISP, and if you already know some form of LISP it's quick to pick up.

I don't think benchmarks are very illuminating, although I've seen elsewhere on this forum that newLISP is very competitive.

newdep
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Post by newdep »

Everybody loves this topic ;-)

Ive seen/used almost all programming languages and as a result I halted a newlisp...So for me newlisp is ->

* Elegantness of the source code
* Readability of the code
* Flexibility of programming

I have not encountered something I could not do with newlisp and because
its fast programming, easy to understand and small code results (and small binary itself!),
contains lots of building components, it has become a daily work-tool! Its like eating with knife and fork. ;-)

Regards, Norman.
-- (define? (Cornflakes))

HPW
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Post by HPW »

Agree to Norman points!

Add some others:

Easy multiplatform (I use it on WIN/SUN Solaris)
Easy embedding into other enviroments (DLL)
Incredible small!!
Very fast for an interpreter!
Enough backward-compatibility to old LISP's like Autolisp.
(Don't teach an old horse new tricks) ;-)

The quote from JSF (kozoru) fits very good:
ANSI C and Lisp got maried and had a superbaby.
Hans-Peter

pjot
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Post by pjot »

Agreed with the above of course! Also I would like to add that programming newLisp itself is almost like a meditation. Each command, each statement, contains so much possibilities, that it needs to be thought of twice. Or more! With just a few lines you can write extremely powerfull programs. Did you write something with newLisp? Next day you'll see it could have been written in a shorter, faster and more elegant way. The syntax is plain and clean, and it has everything you need, including network support.

It's just the best interpreted language around.

Peter

nigelbrown
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Post by nigelbrown »

For me the C source code is small enough and well structured enough that it's fairly easy to find your way around if you want to.

Nigel

Dmi
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Post by Dmi »

Comparing newLisp with perl:
- I have pretty the same quantity of lines of the code for same algorithms for both perl and newlisp (checked for ~300 lines tasks).
- In the same time I've used in newlisp more long "self-describing" function's names - so operators quantity may be smaller for newlisp.
- Overall newlisp code readability is much better (especially when to reread after a few months ;-)
- The (new)lisp code is much more attractive to a normal human logic rather than to a computer one.
- The unlimited nested lists are more useful than hashes/arrays for pretty all cases. For the rest, newlisp have hashes and arrays ;-)
- The (new)lisp lambda- and macro-functions are incredible useful!
- Cross platform - I have it in unix and windows and have no worry.

And, finally, I don't like Prel because it's "dirty" - you can't program efficient and understandable at the same time.
But Perl was the most powerful and useful for fast scripting... before newLisp
;-)
WBR, Dmi

Fanda
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Post by Fanda »

I found some nice comparisons between different languages:

Norvig's site
http://www.norvig.com/java-lisp.html

from there you can find:

An empirical comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl for a search/string-processing program
http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.pdf

Lisp, Java
http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf

===============================================

BASIC Computer Use Today
http://tcltk.gtcs.com/articles/BASIC_today/

Wikipedia is also a good source of information - if you want only short description of the language. (newLISP description could use some editing :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newlisp


Fanda

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