Subject: Re: I don't understand Lisp
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1998/11/05
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3119297904135739@naggum.no>

* mikemac@mikemac.com (Mike McDonald)
| Is it included in CMUCL?  In MacCL?  In Harlequin's?  Proprietary
| solutions to basic functionality do the whole CL community a great
| disservice.

  yeah, verily.  if everybody can't have it for free, there should be a law
  against somebody getting it, _unfairly_.  the community above all!

  you give both communism and laziness a really bad name, Mike.  it's good
  to share innovations and build a strong foundation for oneself and the
  community one is part of, and it's good to have smart people do hard work
  so other smart people can do some _different_ hard work, but community
  welfare and getting away with laziness are _results_, not starting points
  from which you reduce everything else.

  incidentally, regular expressions are not part of _that_ many languages,
  but they are available as libraries from a number of sources, proprietary
  as well as publically available.  and nobody kept you from using a regexp
  library for C with your Lisp system or even writing your own.  but I know
  why you don't write something for yourself -- it would be proprietary to
  yourself and it would be a great disservice to the CL community if you
  just went ahead and created what you need, right?

#:Erik
-- 
  The Microsoft Dating Program -- where do you want to crash tonight?