Bryan Oakley <oakley@healthcare.com> writes:
>To me, the biggest drawback in embedding lisp in a commercial
>product is that list pretty much requires a text editor that knows a
>little about lisp syntax.
Ok, hands up all the people who *can't* get
- a free vi clone (stevie, vim, vile)
- a free Emacs lookalike (jove, top, emacs)
- a programmer's editor such as "alpha" (which ironically uses tcl)
All the DOS, Windows, OS/2, UNIX, and VMS users have their hands down.
The editor I use knows
- how to move forward over an S-expression
- how to move into the next S-expression
- how to move backwards over an S-exression
- how to copy/cut S-expressions
- how to switch S-expressions
- how to autoindent to the same column as the previous line
(the autoindent function copies leading comment symbols too)
- how to put matching brackets around the next/previous N S-expressions
- how to highlight the matching left bracket when a right bracket of
any type is entered.
The total cost is 5030 characters of C *source code*.
Not lines: characters.
And all of these things are also used (with the appropriate syntax
table) when editing C or Fortran or Pascal or Ada or Java or HTML
(treat <> as brackets; it helps a lot). This editor does _not_ know
how to pretty-print Lisp. I've written a fair bit of Lisp code with
it without any trouble. This isn't rocket science! Even vi can do
a lot of these things, and the newer vi clones can do quite a bit.
Here's the punch-line: TCL has all those nested curly braces.
Can you seriously imagine editing TCL with an editor that doesn't
know about TCL quotation marks and curly braces? Well, the editor
I use _can_ handle these things, and the code it handles them _with_
*IS* the code it uses for Lisp!
- move forward over a "string" or {block}
- move into the next {block}
- move backward over a "string" or {block}
- copy/cut a "string" or {block}
- switch strings/block
- autoindent
- put matching braces around things to make a block
- highlight the matching { when a } is entered
You need the *same* things for editing TCL that you do for editing Lisp.
It is a very tiny matter of programming to write one set of code that
handles both, simply by switching a small syntax table (I know because
I've done it). Those 5030 characters of C are just as useful/necessary
for TCL as they are for Lisp.
So where is the advantage of TCL over Lisp?
Not in the editor, that's for certain sure!
--
Will maintain COBOL for money.
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.
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