Re:Why Perl 6 is different
by lispm on Tuesday April 20, 2010 @06:00PM
(#1280731)
Common Lisp has more than 30 special syntactic constructs: block, catch, eval-when, LET, ..., unwind-protect.
It has probably more than a hundred macros that implement syntax: DEFUN, LOOP, DEFMACRO, WITH-OPEN-FILE, DEFPACKAGE, PPRINT-LOGICAL-BLOCK, HANDLER-CASE, ...
It has various basic syntactic elements like function lambda lists, macro lambda lists, etc.
It has FORMAT string syntax.
I'm not trying to win a contest with PERL and its syntax, but thinking that Common Lisp has almost no syntax is misguided. As I mentioned, in Common Lisp much of the syntax is implemented on top of s-expressions.
Stuff like regexp syntax is implemented in Common Lisp libraries. Like this one: http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/ .
It has probably more than a hundred macros that implement syntax: DEFUN, LOOP, DEFMACRO, WITH-OPEN-FILE, DEFPACKAGE, PPRINT-LOGICAL-BLOCK, HANDLER-CASE, ...
It has various basic syntactic elements like function lambda lists, macro lambda lists, etc.
It has FORMAT string syntax.
I'm not trying to win a contest with PERL and its syntax, but thinking that Common Lisp has almost no syntax is misguided. As I mentioned, in Common Lisp much of the syntax is implemented on top of s-expressions.
Stuff like regexp syntax is implemented in Common Lisp libraries. Like this one: http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/ .