Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site bcsaic.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!decvax!tektronix!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!shebs
From: shebs@bcsaic.UUCP (stan shebs)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: AIList Digest   V3 #86 (Comparison of C and Lisp)
Message-ID: <176@bcsaic.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 8-Jul-85 13:09:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: bcsaic.176
Posted: Mon Jul  8 13:09:35 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Jul-85 09:18:18 EDT
References: <8721@ucbvax.ARPA>
Reply-To: shebs@bcsaic.UUCP (stan shebs)
Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center
Lines: 53
Summary: 

>From: Richard K. Jennings 
>Subject: C vs LISP
>
>        We have continuing debates about that subject all the time,
>and I think for us we have come to the conclusion (for now) that
>C is better than LISP.
>        Currently we have MS-DOS 2.0, XLISP 2.0, and Lattice C
>compiler version 2.0.

XLISP is about the poorest dialect of Lisp that I know of, while
Lattice C is good (so I hear).  To put things on the other shoe,
try comparing tiny-C to Zetalisp or Common Lisp.

>Using a copy
>of Winston's Lisp text, he set out with XLISP to produce this
>translator.

Worse and worse - especially if it was the first edition.  And the
second edition is Common Lisp-based!  It's sort of like trying to use
an Ada manual to write Pascal programs.

>There is no doubt in my mind that he prefers Lattice C to XLISP.

I'm a confirmed Lisp hacker, but I also prefer C to XLISP.

>        By September we should be using PC-AT's with GC-LISP, and the
>new Microsoft C compiler.

GC-LISP is only a marginal improvement over XLISP.  The quotes I've 
seen from the AI experts are always to the effect that GC-LISP is good
"for educational purposes" or for "training" - nothing about how it's
adequate for production software.

>The source libraries now
>available in C (or Pascal, real soon now for Ada) will be increasing
>difficult to beat...

This is interesting - I haven't seen any evidence of C libraries that
come anywhere close to what even "small" Lisps like PSL and Franz come
with, let alone Zetalisp or Interlisp.  Full Lisp implementations
(as opposed to XLISP) come with parser generators (yacc in a library?!),
very fancy iteration macros, OOP packages, pattern matchers/unifiers,
elaborate interaction/debugging facilities, graphics packages (sadly
nonstandardized though), sophisticated implementations of useful
datatypes, and so forth.  How can C or Pascal possibly get the datatype
polymorphism that Lispers take for granted, and that most of these
packages depend on for their usefulness?

Don't judge a language by the feeble implementations that have been
done for micros! 

							stan shebs