Re: Lisp (fwd)

[James McCann <jmccann at WOLFENET dot com>]

Well now that I have delurked, I will put in my two cents here as well.

> 
> Heh, another bit of datedness - when I first wrote all that, everybody
> "just knew" Lisp.  Ten years later, it's become an obscure specialty...
> 

I think all programmers should learn a parenthesis heavy language, along w/
several languages from other families.

> 
> Since Lisp has mostly fallen out of use (does AutoCAD still use it?),
> I've speculated on alternatives, such as XML.  So far XML seems like
> an overly complicated way to accomplish what are basically simple
> tasks, so there's not much incentive to change yet.
> 

I deal quite a bit w/ XML at work, and I think if I were to implement xconq
from scratch I would strongly consider using XML versus writing a parser for
a new special purpose language, largely because I have used libxml and I know
I could implement the parser quite easily and the language (game DTD actually)
could be extended quite painlessly.  However I think that inertia and "if it
ain't broke don't fix it" definitely applies here.  One advantage of the 
lisp-like language is that even if you don't fully understand it it is quite
simple to read and at least understand the outline of what is going on (not
that this is the case for me when I look at big chunks of real Lisp or Scheme,
but it is the case w/ GDL).  It is less verbose w/out the need for 
</end-tag>.  It is pretty hard to scan an XML doc and see the structure unless 
it is very well formatted (I am guessing that the casual game designer will 
not have a special purpose XML editting program) while GDL is quite scannable.

XML does have advantages in many areas but I am unconvinced that the pain of
switching would buy much.  If you take away the facts that probably more people
have been exposed to XML than to a lisp-like language, and that there exist 
already parsers for XML, that is just look at the merits of XML processing
vs. GDL processing, I don't think there is a compelling argument to change.
The barrier of not knowing GDL is actually less I think than the barrier of
not knowing XML.

BTW, if the decision to switch is made, I have written yacc and lex files 
which parse the subset of XML that I think would be useful for the project, 
although I have not (yet) implemented DTD validation.  This results in a 
parser which is many times faster than libxml (although less capable).
It may also be more portable than libxml (I am not sure that libxml compiles 
for the mac, but  I don't know if lex and yacc exist for the mac either).

James