Hello all, I have some questions about the CL and I'm thankful if anyone replies to them based on the question number:
1- Why isn't Lisp updated anymore? 2- Why are there two websites? https://common-lisp.net%C2%A0and%C2%A0https://lisp-lang.org/ 3- Is Clojure an enhanced version of the CL? 4- What is the updated version of CL?
Thank you.
Hi Jason,
this mailing list is about administration of the common-lisp.net server; nonetheless I can offer my _personal_ opinions.
I have some questions about the CL and I'm thankful if anyone replies to them based on the question number:
1- Why isn't Lisp updated anymore?
Because it became an ANSI Standard in 1994; you don't simply change standards on a whim.
OTOH, see https://github.com/cl21/cl21.
2- Why are there two websites? https://common-lisp.net%C2%A0and%C2%A0https://lisp-lang.org/
These represent different ways of supporting the CL user base and infrastructure.
3- Is Clojure an enhanced version of the CL?
No. Clojure differs on a few key points; it has a different architecture.
4- What is the updated version of CL?
CL.
Regards,
Phil
Define "updated version" of CL.
On Sun, Feb 19, 2023 at 6:50 AM Jason Long hack3rcon@yahoo.com wrote:
Hello all, I have some questions about the CL and I'm thankful if anyone replies to them based on the question number:
1- Why isn't Lisp updated anymore? 2- Why are there two websites? https://common-lisp.net and https://lisp-lang.org/ 3- Is Clojure an enhanced version of the CL? 4- What is the updated version of CL?
Thank you.
1a) If you mean the implementations, these get regular maintenance, releases, and support.
1b) If you mean the standard/specification, there's no one to update it - writing a new specification like that would mean a lot of time and costs and people.
1c) But updating the spec is still the *easy* part - getting *adoption* is the hard part. And there is very little practical need to adopt a new version of Common Lisp, since ANSI CL survived the test of time rather well. Adopting a new language revision would mean updating all the CL code for a new version, and that would take a lot of work that hardly anyone would be willing to perform.
2) Both of these are "unofficial" websites since there is no one entity to "own" the language. One is a website of the Common Lisp Foundation, a non-profit who serves as a body for organizing Lisp stuff and hosting some common infrastructure; another is a "fan" website describing the basics.
3) Clojure is a completely different language. It's inspired by CL, it's also a Lisp, but it's wildly different in lots of places.
4) There's none that gained practical significance while also being similar enough to CL to be called an updated CL rather than its own dialect (like Clojure or Carp or Janet or Racket). The language is perfectly usable as it is and many people claim it simply doesn't need an upgrade.
On 19.02.2023 06:49, Jason Long wrote:
Hello all, I have some questions about the CL and I'm thankful if anyone replies to them based on the question number:
1- Why isn't Lisp updated anymore? 2- Why are there two websites? https://common-lisp.net%C2%A0and%C2%A0https://lisp-lang.org/ 3- Is Clojure an enhanced version of the CL? 4- What is the updated version of CL?
Thank you.
Agreed. Common Lisp is extremely extensible; almost any language feature you could want can be layered on as a library. I'll offer FSet, my functional collections library, as an example. Functional collections were hardly known at the time of CL's creation -- SETL is the only language I know of that had them back then -- but I was able to graft them onto CL. Admittedly it took some thought and a few compromises, but the result is entirely usable.
(A functional collection type is one where each instance is immutable, but there are efficient operators to produce new instances from existing ones, e.g. by adding a new element to a set.)
From time to time I have thought that it would be nice to have a new
version of CL without the historical warts (why is there no 'e' in 'makunbound'?), but that line of thinking inevitably leads to the conclusion that if I really want that, I should just make it a CL library. If it were a new, incompatible language, it wouldn't be able to run existing CL code, which would make it fairly useless even to me. And if it were CL-compatible, it wouldn't be any different from just a library on top of CL.
The only exceptions would be features that require deep implementation support. Multithreading is the most obvious example; it's not in the spec, but the major implementations added it years ago, and although their APIs aren't the same, there's a library that papers over the differences. High-performance firstclass continuations are the only such feature I can think of that hasn't been implemented, and there are very few applications that need those -- the only one I know of is a theorem prover I'm working on.
-- Scott
On Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 4:44 AM Michał "phoe" Herda phoe@disroot.org wrote:
1a) If you mean the implementations, these get regular maintenance, releases, and support.
1b) If you mean the standard/specification, there's no one to update it
- writing a new specification like that would mean a lot of time and
costs and people.
1c) But updating the spec is still the *easy* part - getting *adoption* is the hard part. And there is very little practical need to adopt a new version of Common Lisp, since ANSI CL survived the test of time rather well. Adopting a new language revision would mean updating all the CL code for a new version, and that would take a lot of work that hardly anyone would be willing to perform.
- Both of these are "unofficial" websites since there is no one entity
to "own" the language. One is a website of the Common Lisp Foundation, a non-profit who serves as a body for organizing Lisp stuff and hosting some common infrastructure; another is a "fan" website describing the basics.
- Clojure is a completely different language. It's inspired by CL, it's
also a Lisp, but it's wildly different in lots of places.
- There's none that gained practical significance while also being
similar enough to CL to be called an updated CL rather than its own dialect (like Clojure or Carp or Janet or Racket). The language is perfectly usable as it is and many people claim it simply doesn't need an upgrade.
On 19.02.2023 06:49, Jason Long wrote:
Hello all, I have some questions about the CL and I'm thankful if anyone replies to
them based on the question number:
1- Why isn't Lisp updated anymore? 2- Why are there two websites? https://common-lisp.net and
3- Is Clojure an enhanced version of the CL? 4- What is the updated version of CL?
Thank you.
-
Jason Long -
Marco Antoniotti -
Michał "phoe" Herda -
Philipp Marek -
Scott L. Burson