Re: [tlug] Alternatives to sed + awk

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Alexander Danilov writes:

 > Lisp in not a competitor for Tcl not in GUI, not in network programming, not
 > in strong typing domain, may be somewhere else,
 > but not in everyday tasks.

Huh?  Granted, Tk is easier to work with than Emacs Lisp for
pixel-based GUI, but that's a historical accident that Emacs 2D UIs
were developed before curses became a universal standard target for
console UIs.  If what you want is text fields, buttons, combo boxes,
and the like, Emacs's widget.el library has all that stuff, just
implemented as an Emacs buffer rather than X11.  As for pixels, XEmacs
used to have an interface to libglade, but that bitrotted.  XEmacs and
Emacs both have network interfaces.  All my everyday tasks are done in
XEmacs. :-)  And that's just the poor cousin Lisp from the slums.

The major Common Lisps all have bindings for many of the major GUI
toolkits, and of course sockets and the like.

 > Haskell is competitor, but not Lisp.

You've got to be kidding.

 > > In Tcl, however, you have very weak typing.  Everything at Tcl command
 > > level is a string, so that
 > >
 > >       For example, the commands
 > >              set a 3
 > >              set b {$a + 2}
 > >              expr $b*4
 > >       return 11, not a multiple of 4.  This is because the Tcl parser
 > >       will first substitute $a + 2 for the variable b, then the expr
 > >       command will evaluate the expression $a + 2*4.

 > It is not weakness of Tcl, it's just consequence of one of 11 rules of
 > languges.

Now I'm sure you're kidding. ;-)