EMACS and Lisp

[Kevin Cozens]

William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
> 2.  How does Lisp work?  Is it interpreted like Perl or Python, or
> compiled like C?  How portable is it - if I installed it at work on a
> Windoze machine, would the Lisp code I write on Linux work?
> 
> 3.  Which Lisp?  I hear Lisp spoken of in the same sentence as Smalltalk
> and Scheme - are they mostly the same?  Is common Lisp the way to go?
 >
> Any personal experiences to share or resources to recommend?  Thanks.

I have generally stayed away from Emacs. I'm quite happy with vi(m).

I first read about Lisp when it was the theme of a BYTE magazine many years 
ago. I have never used Lisp. I have used (and use) the language known as 
Scheme (a Lisp variant). I have seen Scheme used for some of the computing 
component of some card games. I only use Scheme in relation to the Script-Fu 
scripting system of the graphics program GIMP.

There are a lot of Scheme interpreters available. Guile, pltScheme, mzScheme, 
DrScheme, Bigloo, SCM, scheme48, and TinyScheme come to mind. I recently 
replaced the very old SIOD-based Scheme interpreter used in Script-Fu with 
TinyScheme since it was small, easy to embed, and follows the Scheme standard 
as much as is possible considering its small size.

If the Scheme interpreter you use is available for, or can be compiled for, 
the OS yin which you want to run it, your code useable. If the Lisp/Scheme 
code is written for a given interpreter you may find you have trouble running 
it with a different one depending on the level of compliance to the standards 
and the library of routines provided by the different interpreters.

-- 
Cheers!

Kevin.

http://www.interlog.com/~kcozens/ |"What are we going to do today, Borg?"
Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172        |"Same thing we always do, Pinkutus:
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