POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Land of Lisp : Re: Land of Lisp Server Time
3 Sep 2024 23:23:06 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Land of Lisp  
From: Darren New
Date: 2 Nov 2010 13:13:24
Message: <4cd046b4@news.povray.org>
Invisible wrote:
> All I know is that every time I've used a dynamically-typed language, 
> I've spent 90% of my time fixing type errors 

You're not thinking clearly, then.  Type errors in a dynamically typed 
language are not something that crop up a lot for people who use such 
languages frequently. It takes a little getting used to to remember what 
types variables are while you're writing a function, but how hard can that be?

Now, if you use a lot of crappy undocumented libraries, sure, that can be 
problematic. But that's true in any language.

The only time I get type problems is I'll occasionally mix up something like 
a list of list of X with a list of X, but that bombs out the first time you 
run it if the type system isn't absurdly forgiving, so it's not really any 
more of a problem than it getting caught the first time you compile it.

(Of course, if your IDE catches such things before you've even finished 
typing the body of the function, it's nice.)

 > From what little I've seen, a Lisp DSL just looks like Lisp.

That's because the people writing and using the DSLs are comfortable with 
LISP. LISP had read macros, so they can look like anything you want.

 > Every other language I've ever seen that has an eval function has been 
interpreted.

The *eval* call has to be interpreted, sure. But if you don't use eval, 
everything is compiled. If you do use eval, everything but the eval is compiled.

You're aware that C# has (or will have, depending how strict you want to be) 
the equivalent of eval, right?  As does Java, in some sense?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."


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