newlispfanclub.alh.net

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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
;-)

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

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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