Which is the best implementation of LISP family of languages for real world programming ?
http://wiki.alu.org/Implementation Kindly pick one from commercial and one from open-source . The criteria is : libraries, gui interface and builder, libraries for TCP, and evolving needs. Please compare LISP and its virtues with other languages such as javascript, python etc. I put javascript in the context that it is very similar in its architecture (homoiconic ie same representation for data-structures and operations, ie hierarchical, which means nested-lists <=> n-ary tree <=> binary tree <=> linked-list <=> dictionary <=> task-subtask, and implicitly based on what C calls pointers, and at machine level the indirect addressing of memory) to lisp family. I put python in the context that it has the most extensive libraries and shares the build-fix virtue of lisp highlighted by Paul Graham in his books. Python is touted for its rapid prototyping of guis. It syntax enforces stable format which guards against programmer malice or sloppiness - so that there is a certain level of legacy code readability. Both have eval but not clear what is the implementation efficiency to justify the habit of excessively using it. Certainly, lisp/scheme are excellent for learning the concepts of programming languages due to its multi-paradigm nature and readily available code of the elementary interpreter. Is there an IDE for these lispish-scheming languages ? Is there quality implementation for Eclipse ? Emacs pre-supposes some knowledge of these so that newbie can get stuck. Also, emacs help is not very good. Is there a project whereby the internal help of emacs (analogous to its man pages) are being continuously being updated AND shared ? I have never seen updates to the help. Perhaps, the commercial people are doing it, even from the posts of the newsgroups, but the public distros or these newsgroups have NEVER made such an announcement. Explanations integrated into the help are more important than the books - its like the wikipedia incorporated into emacs. Is there support for the color highlighting of the code by hovering as on this page ? http://community.schemewiki.org/?lexical-scope Which book/paper has the briefest minimal example of gui design along XML nested/hiearchical elements with event-listeners for lisp/scheme ? Thanks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
