Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET

yep thats it.

a short info on LISP

one of the "Classic" AI languages

stands for LISt Processing
AFAIK recall

can be used for string processing problems.

was used by a school to do an AI system
where it built up a database of word-relations and english grammer / syntax.

a program on PBS showed a sample of one production....

it would ask a question each time it "thought" it found a valid statement.

so it asked if this was true:

a father is to a family as a dictator is to a small country?

this was a ? it made based on it's data about the key words Father,Family,COuntry,Dictator

not bad.... this was I think late 70's or early 80's so it took a day to process a few words and formulate a set of questions.

Lisp/Lisp machines seems to be where microsoft .net is taking the OS.
They are even adding closures.
I would personally like to see them or someone
support lisp as a mainstream .net language.

Actually, LISP has survived the AI times. It can be used as any programming language for other applications as well (for example AutoCAD is programmed in LISP). Many ideas of LISP have been taken over by JAVA and .NET (high level language, virtual machine, garbage collection...).

I've been leading a team of LISP developers (and doing some coding myself) for a number of years. We create planning tools used in the airline industry's daily business.

IMHO, besides powerful string processing facilities, LISP's main advantage are:

- Fast development cycles (as it's an interpreted language like JAVA and C#/.NET, so no lengthy linking-compiling stuff. Further, each function or method can be modified/loaded/tested separately at runtime. By experience, much faster to write than JAVA and of course C++)

- Incredible flexibility (any algorithm, structure, concept can be programmed in a very natural way. What other language easily allows you to create functions that create functions? BTW, unlike JAVA, LISP also supports multiple inheritance)

- Short learning curve for programmers as one can program LISP in any style (functional, OO) and make the code look like your favourite language (might it be C, JAVA, Pascal, Fortran, VB...). This might also be a disadvantage, especially in big projects (> 1 man!) because it doesn't force one to use a particuliar structure. If this annoys you, you can still use the very LISP-like Smalltalk, which is 100% OO and ortogonal and thus enforces a bit more disciplin.

The main disdvantages is that the LISP community is quite small compared to the C and JAVA communities. But it's still vivid! Nearly all programmers I know who got to use LISP were reluctant at the beginning, but are now fervent supporters of it. So why not give it a try?

For more information, I recommend http://www.lispworks.com/.

For a free personal edition development environment (Windows or LINUX/UNIX), I know 2 possibilities: you can download the one at the site above (belonging to XAnalys) or the one at Franz (www.franz.com). There are also other smaller vendors. I personally prefer XAnalys (better support than Franz and better GUI library). The 2 main vendors (Franz & Xanalys) collaborate on many developments.

Lisp is usually compiled when used for serious applications, not interpreted on a VM. It's therefore incorrect to call it an "interpreted language"

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