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0 pointslispm8y ago0 comments

> For all practical purposes CL, Scheme, Clojure and Elisp are all lisps.

Since only CL and Emacs Lisp can and do share actual Lisp code, I call only them Lisp for practical purposes.

For 'unpractical' purposes - they share no source code but are influenced by practical Lisp - , Logo, Javascript, Ruby, Clojure ... are also Lisp.

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kamaal8y ago

>>Since only CL and Emacs Lisp can and do share actual Lisp code

But what exactly is 'actual lisp'. I mean what is this strict definition?

Forgive me, I understand calling Scheme and CL as same might feel like saying Java and C++ as same. But one would be right in saying Java and C++ both come from a C based paradigm.

On the same lines one could say CL and Scheme come from lisp paradigm. At this point in time both communities compared to any major language community are so small that one could refer to both as Lisp.

lispmOP8y ago

The problem is that both CL and Scheme communities have very little to do with each other.

For practical purposes Lisp dialects are those directly inheriting back to Lisp I from McCarthy. You can run programs from 1960 in Common Lisp with very little changes (unless it uses machine interfaces). To port them to Scheme is possible. To port them to Logo, Clojure, Javascript or other languages considered to be dialects in a wider sense mostly means a rewrite.

Thus for me Lisp means the dialects of Lisp and their respective communities which can share code, libraries, applications by relatively simple ports. For example Emacs Lisp has Common Lisp enhancements, which are semantically very similar. ISLISP could be directly integrated into a Common Lisp - Kent Pitman mentioned that he actually did that to see that they are culturally compatible.

Languages who don't directly share code are maybe part of an abstract family, which has no agreed on definition - thus this is for practical purposes relatively useless.

flavio818y ago

>The problem is that both CL and Scheme communities have very little to do with each other.

At first I thought this was absurd, but after some time learning Lisp this was more obvious.

Scheme and Common Lisp are built around totally different philosophies, and thus not only the languages diverge, but also the way you program in them.

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