<adeger@my-deja.com> wrote:
+---------------
| My question: does Lisp have the ability to do many/all of the tasks
| that I currently use Perl for?
+---------------
Well, what *do* you use Perl for? No, that's not a facetious question.
The answer really does depend on what you expect from a "glue language",
or as someone else said [paraphrased], "gluing what to what?"
If you're comfortable with Perl already, and use it frequently enough
that you don't forget all the myriads of magic characters [that's *my*
main problem with Perl, b.t.w.], and only use it in "write-only" mode
so that you don't ever, *ever* have to go back and figure out what
you wrote a year or a month or a week later [that's my #2 problem
with Perl], then Perl is just fine for certain tasks. It certainly
minimizes keystrokes, *that's* for sure!
If the answer to any of those "if"s is negative, then you may find
Common Lisp (or a robust Scheme, of which there are a few) to be
more to your taste... once you get used to it.
Myself, I've written a goodly number of tiny scripts in Scheme
(Rice PLT's "MzScheme", usually), since I came to Scheme and got
used to doing that sort of stuff in it before I got exposed to CL.
Most of them are the sorts of text-bashing thingies that others
around here tend to use Perl for. Here are a few examples:
plite Infix dialect of Scheme, used for Tcl-like scripting.
[*Why*? A very long story for another time...]
= A shell alias for "plite", mainly for quick&dirty
command-line arithmetic (including bignums), e.g.:
% = '41.3*(20.7+34.2)'
2267.37
% = expt 2 100
1267650600228229401496703205376
% = map iota "'(5 2 3)"
((0 1 2 3 4) (0 1) (0 1 2))
%
chklog Rummage through /usr/adm/SYSLOG & /usr/adm/oSYSLOG
looking for unexpected or "strange" events.
http-get Dirt-simple command-line web tool:
% http-get -head http://reality.sgi.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Zeus/3.3
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 04:35:27 GMT
Connection: close
Content-type: text/html
%
keto Help with low-carb diet, e.g., what about almonds?
[Low-carb diets suggest ketogenic ratios >1.0]
% keto 6 4 16
grams: protein 6 carb 4 fat 16
calories: protein 24 carb 16 fat 144 total 184
%calories: protein 13.0 carb 8.7 fat 78.3
ketogenic ratio: 1.89
%
scan Rummage through heaps of saved email looking for matches
more complex than "grep" can handle. [Work in progress...]
sgi-opt What are my SGI options worth today? ;-} ;-}
stockquote Fetch quotes from a web page, trim all the HTML and
just show numbers (converted to decimals):
% stockquote SGI IBM
SGI = 4.0
IBM = 98.5
%
[This one keeps breaking as sites increasingly tart up
their pages with more & more eye candy... (*sigh*) ]
vq SGI provides a GUI calendar/reminder tool called
"vcal". The "vq" script dumps out plaintext from
vcal's database. E.g., to see what's on for tomorrow:
% vq -d 22
One-time events:
(none)
Repeating events:
2000 Nov 22 13:30 (60): staff meeting
2000 Nov 22 15:00 (60): gmh/rpw3 1-on-1
2000 Nov 22 20:00 (120): ex-SGI/friends dinner
%
Please note that any of those could just as easily have been written
in Common Lisp, had I started with it first instead of Scheme.
-Rob
-----
Rob Warnock, 31-2-510 rpw3@sgi.com
Network Engineering http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
Silicon Graphics, Inc. Phone: 650-933-1673
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. PP-ASEL-IA
Mountain View, CA 94043