Re: Developers Guide to Semantic Web Toolkits for different Programming Languages

No, if you say "Lisp" it isn't actually any language you can get a compiler
for, for example. Not true for Java or C. Ever since McCarthy's "Lisp 1.5"
was obsoleted, no "Lisp system" has actually been called "Lisp", and no
dialect has been called that either.

My observation (having been a user of many "Lisp" systems over the past 20+
years) is that only people who do not use any Lisp dialect call this *family
of languages* "Lisp".

And, having a Scheme program handy for some purpose does not help you -- at
all -- if you prefer Common Lisp.

    - Ora

-- 
Ora Lassila  mailto:ora.lassila@nokia.com  http://www.lassila.org/
Research Fellow & Head of Competence Area (Data Modeling & Management)
Nokia Research Center / Boston

> From: "ext Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
> Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2005 12:50:07 -0500 (EST)
> To: <ora.lassila@nokia.com>
> Cc: <chris@bizer.de>, <mail@d-westphal.de>, <semantic-web@w3.org>
> Subject: Re: Developers Guide to Semantic Web Toolkits for different
> Programming Languages
> 
> From: Ora Lassila <ora.lassila@nokia.com>
> Subject: Re: Developers Guide to Semantic Web Toolkits for different
> Programming Languages
> Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2005 11:51:15 -0500
> 
>> Chris,
> 
> [...]
> 
>> First, "Lisp" is not an actual programming language per se. You should say
>> "Common Lisp" (this is the ANSI X3J13 Standard). There are other dialects,
>> such as "Scheme", but I haven't seen any RDF software for those.
> 
> Come again?  I would say that Lisp is just as much an actual programming
> language as C++ or Java.  Yes, there are different dialects of Lisp but so
> are there (or were there) different dialects of Java, just ask Sun and
> Microsoft.  Many other programming languages have distinct dialects;  I
> would guess that there are significant dialects of almost every widely used
> programming languages.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Peter F. Patel-Schneider
> Bell Labs Research
> 
> PS:  Yes, yes, I know that the Java disagreement has been sort of resolved.

Received on Tuesday, 8 February 2005 18:39:06 UTC