[racket] Common Lisp or Racket?

On Wed, 13 Nov 2013, Hendrik Boom wrote:

[...]
> OCaml is not Haskell.  Not remotely.  Ocaml is *not* a vehicle for 
> research into lazy evaluation of purely functinoal code.

Yeah, this expectation actually drove me to Ocaml.

[...]
> pixel cup, nor did I expect to.  My code is available at 
> http://topoi.pooq.com/hendrik/dv/free/fun/wander/index.html
> Have fun.  You'll need some obscure development libraries to run it.

Cool, I have a liking for 3d generated landscapes, composed of green grass 
and blue heavens :-). Will have a look, thank you.

[...]
> > (OTOH, I'm not sure if I'd want to write compiler in Racket. Maybe. For a 
> > while, I want to use both CL and R* and see what happens.)
> 
> Scheme is a lot better than many languages for writing a compiler, 
> actually.  I'd certainly prefer it to C or C++.  Recently I've noticed 
> compilers being written in OCaml, which seems well-suited to it.

Well, it may be better, if you mean Racket - to be sure I would have to 
use it for some bigger project (bigger than quick hack). Old style, R5RS 
Scheme, without certain stuff I would like to have, like hash tables, is 
not too much better IMHO (sure, I can write this stuff or find it on the 
net/SRFIs/slib etc but I would rather have most of it built in from the 
beginning). I have just looked around, and actually C is used quite often.

ocaml - mix of Ocaml and C

ghc - prototyped in ML, nowadays Haskell and some C for bootstraping

gcc - without looking inside I guess C and maybe something else like 
 assembly

javac - I will not bet but last time I cared it was written in C, I 
 suppose

chicken - Scheme, albeit distro tar includes C-files generated from scm 
 sources, to ease compilation

stalin - Scheme

kawa - mostly Java with some *.scm files

racket - looks like plenty of C with some *.rkt here and there

sbcl - full of CL files, requires working CL to build

fpc - looks like Pascal and assembly

pugscc - prototype Perl6 compiler in Haskell

So, it seems C is used for projects which started earlier in history and 
when they could, they switched to be self hosting. Thus Scheme ends up 
being used to write its own compilers, at best.

I guess the time when one could use Scheme for such task is mostly past. 
We will have to wait a bit before we see Scheme used for writing some 
_big_ project again. Perhaps Racket will change this. I mean, for the 
better :-).

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **