News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on How newLisp Took My Breath (And Syntax) Away. Parent comment

Re:How newLisp Took My Breath (And Syntax) Away by mahmud on Saturday January 09, 2010 @01:01AM (#1041100)
Lispers can bicker over technicalities and matters of taste, but any programmer of a Lisp dialect would prefer to move to another, instead of using something else like Java or C++. At least I would. Even small Scheme-like dialects that are embedded in big libraries and industrial applications (stuff like Lush[1]) is very palatable to any Lisper (Arc, Goo and other curiosities are also interesting.)

Not so with NewLisp. It's fundamentally broken in ways that would be make me look forward to ASP.NET over it. To give you an example; to calculate the value of Pi, they suggests one fire an external process and run the Unix bc(1) command to do that :-P http://www.newlisp.org/index.cgi?page=Code_Snippets

[1] http://lush.sourceforge.net/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How newLisp Took My Breath (And Syntax) Away by itistoday on Sunday January 10, 2010 @04:24PM (#1043690)
To someone who wants to use newLISP for calculating Pi to the nth digit, it might appear "fundamentally broken." Of course I don't know why on earth you would want to do that in the first place, using a program/language specialized for such a task would be a far brighter idea, as such, the doc you refers to correctly suggests using the 'bc' program.

However, for someone who wants a Lisp for rapid web development, newLISP is a dream come true:

http://www.rundragonfly.com

As emphasized in the article: use the language that's most appropriate for the task at hand.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How newLisp Took My Breath (And Syntax) Away by qu1j0t3 on Monday January 11, 2010 @04:42PM (#1046100)
And if you want the value of pi, why not just use the same method invoked by bc in that code snippet: 4*atan(1)

http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/newlisp_manual.html#atan

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How newLisp Took My Breath (And Syntax) Away by itistoday on Monday January 11, 2010 @01:47PM (#1045671)
newLISP also has a bignum module (with 64-bit support):

http://www.newlisp.org/code/modules/gmp.lsp.html

[ Parent | on HN ]