Advantages of newLISP compared with other scripting tools?

[cormullion]

I'd be interested in your opinions as to what you think are the main benefits of newLISP compared with some of the other mainstream scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby)... I can certainly see the benefits of newLISP over old LISP, and if you already know some form of LISP it's quick to pick up.



I don't think benchmarks are very illuminating, although I've seen elsewhere on this forum that newLISP is very competitive.

[newdep]

Everybody loves this topic ;-)



Ive seen/used almost all programming languages and as a result I halted a newlisp...So for me newlisp is ->



* Elegantness of the source code

* Readability of the code

* Flexibility of programming



I have not encountered something I could not do with newlisp and because

its fast programming, easy to understand and small code results (and small binary itself!),

contains lots of building components, it has become a daily work-tool! Its like eating with knife and fork. ;-)



Regards, Norman.

[HPW]

Agree to Norman points!



Add some others:



Easy multiplatform (I use it on WIN/SUN Solaris)

Easy embedding into other enviroments (DLL)

Incredible small!!

Very fast for an interpreter!

Enough backward-compatibility to old LISP's like Autolisp.

(Don't teach an old horse new tricks) ;-)



The quote from JSF (kozoru) fits very good:

ANSI C and Lisp got maried and had a superbaby.

[pjot]

Agreed with the above of course! Also I would like to add that programming newLisp itself is almost like a meditation. Each command, each statement, contains so much possibilities, that it needs to be thought of twice. Or more! With just a few lines you can write extremely powerfull programs. Did you write something with newLisp? Next day you'll see it could have been written in a shorter, faster and more elegant way. The syntax is plain and clean, and it has everything you need, including network support.



It's just the best interpreted language around.



Peter

[nigelbrown]

For me the C source code is small enough and well structured enough that it's fairly easy to find your way around if you want to.



Nigel

[Dmi]

Comparing newLisp with perl:

- I have pretty the same quantity of lines of the code for same algorithms for both perl and newlisp (checked for ~300 lines tasks).

- In the same time I've used in newlisp more long "self-describing" function's names - so operators quantity may be smaller for newlisp.

- Overall newlisp code readability is much better (especially when to reread after a few months ;-)

- The (new)lisp code is much more attractive to a normal human logic rather than to a computer one.

- The unlimited nested lists are more useful than hashes/arrays for pretty all cases. For the rest, newlisp have hashes and arrays ;-)

- The (new)lisp lambda- and macro-functions are incredible useful!

- Cross platform - I have it in unix and windows and have no worry.



And, finally, I don't like Prel because it's "dirty" - you can't program efficient and understandable at the same time.

But Perl was the most powerful and useful for fast scripting... before newLisp

;-)

[Fanda]

I found some nice comparisons between different languages:



Norvig's site

http://www.norvig.com/java-lisp.html">http://www.norvig.com/java-lisp.html



from there you can find:



An empirical comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl for a search/string-processing program

http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.pdf">http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.pdf



Lisp, Java

http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf">http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf



===============================================



BASIC Computer Use Today

http://tcltk.gtcs.com/articles/BASIC_today/">http://tcltk.gtcs.com/articles/BASIC_today/



Wikipedia is also a good source of information - if you want only short description of the language. (newLISP description could use some editing :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newlisp">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newlisp





Fanda