Subject: Re: Reasons for rejecting Lisp (was Re: Newbie questions [Followup to comp.lang.lisp]) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/05/08 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3135136169957202@naggum.no> * me@spam.not | Being able to build an executable program which can run on different | computers that don't have Lisp is not just a commercial concern. but if you want to run it on such computers, won't they _get_ a Lisp? please remember that C executable are _not_ standalone unless you go to a very serious effort and bloat your executables tremendously. the whole idea with shared libraries is to capitalize on common parts of what was once in a number of executables, and it has made life seriously simpler for large libraries. the idea is no different than what was once done on mainframes, with massive amounts of good stuff in the operating system so each program wouldn't need it. I regard the .fasl files as Lisp's "executables", and the fact that I might need to run them from inside a "real" Lisp executable that does what would otherwise be shared libraries is a meaningless quibble -- people seem to accept having to run multiple programs to start their applications already. if it really is such a big deal, making a .fasl file become an .exe file that did this on its own seems like such a no-brainer I really wonder why people think it's a show-stopper that others haven't done it for them. (yes, I assume this is under Windows -- Unix people are used to so much weird shit being "executable", in practice whatever the system call execve(2) is happy with.) #:Erik