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On Lisp

Name: Anonymous 2013-12-28 9:08

Of course, it's feature complete!

Common Lisp is its own standard library. Here are its contents: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index.htm

It's got a whopping 980 functions for all your needs with intuitive and easy to remember names like least-negative-normalized-double-float, update-instance-for-redefined-class, load-logical-pathname-translations, simple-condition-format-arguments, internal-time-units-per-second, pprint-exit-if-list-exhausted and so on. Of course, it purposefully lacks the negligible nonsense like a graphical toolkit, image processing, nonblocking asynchronous IO, remoting, cryptography, SQL, text processing, archive tools, concurrency, parallelism, thread-safe data structures, monitoring & management, printing support, sound and processing, XML toolkits - all of that is useless, after all! The most important thing is that you get to use anaphoric lambdas and pandoric captures whilst munching on momma's tasty soup!

Seriously, you say "a core library" as if Lisp is a practical general-purpose PL. It's a lie. Lisp is no such thing, hence such a short stub in place of a core library and a trashpile of unmaintained cruftworks from fanboy-soup-eaters (a.k.a. CLiki). Look at the core libs of industrial-strength languages like Java or Python. They were forged in the fires of practical problem-solving over many years. While the Lispers have spent the whole 50 years of their totem's existence forging only one thing: their self-aggrandizement.

Although, to do Lisp justice, it should be noted that Franz and Allegro did crank out their bicycle-crutch-ersatz-"core" libraries. This is because during lisp-hype of the 80-90ies these gescheftmachers have managed to get several rich yet clueless Pinocchios addicted to the Lisp drug. Like Boeing, for example. And when the Pinocchios started trying to solve real problems lispishly, they had to hurriedly plug that gaping hole. So go ahead and spend some $4500 for a real Lisp - it's an easy sum for a Lisper, right? - and welcome to the miraculous world of Professional Lisp Pinocchios.

Name: Anonymous 2014-01-05 19:26

Not that I know of. Not even in e.g. Mathematica.

What's called a function in most programming languages does not enforce the required properties of a function. Even if it did, it's very debatable whether an abstract concept like a function can ever be reified (general sense) like that. It's far more acceptable for it to be the other way around. You can analyze part of some program as a function (but it is not a function!)

In fact, out of all the words used to refer to the same thing (procedure, subroutine, callable unit etc. etc.) function is the worst.

Especially annoying is that in e.g. VB.NET you have "subroutines" and "functions" and the difference between them is that a "function" might return a value (i.e. if it exits locally). What a load of baloney!

However, I have long since accepted that function in programming languages means something entirely different than it does in mathematics. However this one uibqutious historical precedence is no excuse for Haskell programmers to keep making the same mistake over and over again; misusing words with clear meanings from mathematics to describe things they slightly but not fully resemble to the detriment of anyone who knows the slightest bit of mathematics.

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