Very interesting sites. Thank you. John Purser
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Alan Gauld Sent: Friday, January 21, 2005 14:33 To: Liam Clarke; Tutor Tutor Subject: Re: [Tutor] Ooer, OT Lisp > 1) Anyone here familiar with both? Yes at least two of us - DAnny has used Lisp/Scheme. > 2) If so, which would you rate as more powerful? Lisp by a long long way. Its more mature and has every bell and whistle going. Of course its much much harder to become an expert in Lisp for the same reason. > 3) What's with all those parentheses? Read my page on Functional Programming. Basically every Lisp program statement is an expression, and like most complex expressions you need parens... Basically a Lisp program is just a whole heap of nested expressions! It doesn't really need them of course but its one of the things that makes Lisp very regular in a math sense, very pure in approach, and why the academics say its the only "beautiful" language. > 4) Perhaps the powerful question's a bit vague, how about ease of > use? I like that the simplest Lisp expression is - , but those > brackets.... Its very easy to use once you learn it. But its initially different to traditional programming languages (although since it was invented in the early 60s - late 50's even??? - it is ttraditional in itself!) > 5) Are you able to point me towards a simplified explanation of how > the 'syntaxless' language can write programmes? Try the How To Design Programs (htdp.org) and Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs (sicp.org) web sites. Both are excellent books published by MIT for free on the web. Both use Scheme which is a close relative of Common Lisp. I strongly recommend you check them out your programming in general will improve a lot from reading either book. The first is easier for non maths folks, SICP is a software engineering classic textbook. Alan G Author of the Learn to Program web tutor http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
