Been working with Scheme (aka Racket) for a while and so far I find functional programming very nifty. And I hear you all lisp gods talking about the godlessness of Lisp, but I'm a bit confused because Common Lisp turns out to be just a specification and I can't find such thing as an "official" implementation of it, or figure out which implementation is the best/the one to use.
What are the best Lisp implementations for Windows and why?
And what are the substantial differences between Scheme and Lisp? And what makes people say Lisp is better?
There are no ``official" implementations of Common Lisp like with Python or Java, the best one for Linux (in terms of speed) is SBCL, though it sucks and is buggy on Windows.
CLisp is very compatible but it's Ruby-slow .
I don't really see why you're asking if the Lisp programming family is better as you are using a dialect inside of that family.
Biggest differences between family of Lisp and family of Scheme IMO is that in Scheme there is only one scope and in Lisp there is both a function scope and data scope (which IMHO makes no sense).
Read my post http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1297431885/8
On Windows, you'll want ClozureCL (fully functional, with threading support), SBCL(functional, fastest of them all, but no threading support on Win32, also UNIX signal handling is half broken), ECL (pretty decent, but some minor issues with gray streams) and maybe CLISP (overall pretty slow).
>>3
Dead? Pretty much all major implementations are actively developed. It's no deader than any other Lisp or dog. You also have plenty of libraries being developed for CL and many implementation extensions which are getting more popular and being ported to other implementations. You probably won't get a third version of the ANSI standard, but this is hardly an issue.