On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 01:01:14PM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > Chad Perrin wrote: > > . . . this has prompted me to take a second look at SBCL. Is it > > entirely backward-compatible? Does it provide the same additional > > functionality (debugger, et cetera)? How, technically, do CMUCL and > > SBCL differ, in general? > > > > I ask in case you have the answers off the top of your head. If not, no > > biggie -- I'm on my way to look up more information about SBCL so I can > > compare them now. > > I'm not sure about compatibility. CMUCL is Carnegie-Mellon University > Common Lisp and SBCL is Steel Bank Common Lisp. Carnegie made his money > in steel and Mellon made his money in banking, you see ... I was not aware of that connection for the name of SBCL. Wow, that's amusing. > > CMUCL is kind of big and unwieldy and difficult to extend, so SBCL arose > to attempt to make things a little more "agile", if you will. For > example, there's probably no hope of a Windows port of CMUCL, but there > is one for SBCL. Good to know. I'd love to see a lot more software with its "open source" licensing more along the lines of MIT/BSD/public domain become more popular on all platforms, rather than seeing proprietary and GPL software getting all the publicity and hype all the time. > > As far as application speed is concerned, it's sort of a horse race > between GCL and CMUCL. GCL wins some benchmarks, CMUCL wins some, and > some are too close to call. Clisp is probably the most portable of the > bunch -- it runs on nearly every UNIX and is installed with CygWin. I > think there is a native Windows port too. I seem to recall reading somewhere that GNU CLISP runs in something absurd like 16MB of RAM -- a simply astoundingly small amount of memory. That's a pretty neat trick for an ANSI standard implementation of pretty much anything. > > > Speaking of communities -- do you know of any mailing lists akin to > > ruby-talk, or open community websites akin to PerlMonks? What about > > beginner mailing lists? Extensive searching has turned up exactly one > > general-purpose Common Lisp mailing list thus far, and I don't know > > anything about the list yet beyond that. > > Well ... I was on the CMUCL and SBCL developers' lists a while back, but > I don't think I've ever frequented a "Lisp Beginners" mailing list. I'd > start with "comp.lang.lisp" if you can stand the fact that most Lispniks > think there really isn't another real programming language. I don't mind the attitude -- I can just mentally route around it (my bio-neural network is a bit like the Internet that way). The problem I have with that is that it's a newsgroup rather than a mailing list. A) I have yet to meet a newsreader that doesn't drive me up the wall. B) I don't need yet another "thing" to keep track of -- I'm trying to consolidate all my daily online communications (IMs notwithstanding) in email as much as possible so I don't have to make regular trips to other applications to get caught up. > > I believed that myself a long time ago, until I discovered nobody was > paying people to code in Lisp but Fortran and assembler would earn you a > decent living. Hey, that doesn't mean they're "real" programming languages. Heh. > > I also think a PDF of most of the book "Practical Common Lisp" is on > line somewhere. I went and bought a hard copy anyway. It tells you how > to do 21st century stuff like web servers in Lisp. :) Someone on this list privately and kindly emailed me with the URL for that. I started reading the introduction this evening. I may well buy the hardcopy myself, if I like it enough. I'm actually more likely to purchase a technical book after I've already read it than before (take note, Pragmatic Progammers: I'm your target market for stuff like the Pickaxe Book's free-digital-and-paid-print versions). The same was true of music, until I just started boycotting all RIAA labels entirely. . . . but that's a story for another day (and mailing list). -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] This sig for rent: a Signify v1.14 production from http://www.debian.org/