🚀 go-pugleaf

In <9105231427.AA09586@cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu> kanderso@BBN.COM writes:
>Yes, from what i've read ProKappa sounds like a cleverly disguised LISP in
>C clothing.  This certainly may have some marketing advantages these days,
>but who knows about technical.  As time goes on, it may be that C looks at
>lot more like LISP.  For example, garbage collection is a major issue in
>C++ these days.

have you seen any of the interactive c environments such as sabre c?  prokappa
is to sabre c roughly as kee was to lucid lisp.

saber c gives you a little bit of lispish stuff, such as the ability to
redefine functions on the fly, a debugger, the ability to inspect objects, the
ability to freely mix compiled and interpretted code.  it does this at a
price, however - it seems to me to be a much worse memory hog than lisp is.
of course, the advantage is that when you're done developing, you can leave
the saber environment behind and run in pure c.

>  > 2. Isolation from mainstream software tools.  C programmers can use,
>  > for example, the Motif and Open Look GUI toolkits directly.  LISP
>  > programmers either have to build a foreign function call interface to
>  > a C-based application or wait for someone else to provide one.

>But the foreign function interface is a good way to get to this
>"mainstream" software.  If you thought about it, you might be able to write
>the interface automatically.  You could even think of LISP as the glue that
>holds your C together.  This might give you most of the best of both worlds.

yes, i have done a considerable amount of development with lisp in this mode
(lisp as glue).  one useful mechanism i have found for doing this is using the
RPC protocol.  unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a good publicly
available implementation of a lisp/rpc interface.  i have hacked together some
of the client-side stuff myself in a not-too-portable fashion (i use the
foreign-function inteface and load a lot of object code from system libraries
rather than writing all the way down to the lowest levels in lisp).  ...but it
works pretty well for the several systems i've used it on.

dave duff                   mitre corporation               703-883-7731
duff@ai.mitre.org          ai technical center            mclean, va usa
-- 
dave duff                   mitre corporation               703-883-7731
duff@ai.mitre.org          ai technical center            mclean, va usa