Interesting: "Lisp as a competitive advantage"

[Hannah Schroeter]

Hello!

On Thu, May 03, 2001 at 06:09:01PM -0500, Dan Knapp wrote:
> [...]

>   Yeah, it's a good example, but are there any other uses for such quoting?
> If not, then implementing it as a builtin is perfectly adequate.  (Not
> trying to pick on Lisp; Lisp is great.  Just hoping for more examples.)

IMHO you can do all the things you'd do with separate preprocessing
steps for other languages with Lisp macros, inclusing scanner/parser
generating for some example. Or you could do the analogous thing
to camlp4 in Lisp with Lisp's own standard features (reader macros
+ normal macros).

You can e.g. also emulate Emacs Lisp in Common Lisp by slightly
hacking up the readtable and defining a few macros and functions
into a separate package. That's quite easy, in fact, the more complicated
part would be offering all those primitive functions of Emacs Lisp,
but if you had this, you could compile all those Emacs Lisp packages
into fast code. Imagine GNUs *not* crawling like a snail on a
Pentium 200 *g*

Kind regards,

Hannah.