Subject: Re: On Lisp From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2001 13:16:14 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3209116573841422@naggum.net> * Mark Hulme-Jones > The reason I thought it's worth specifying is not so much to ensure the > same interface from vendors (though this would be an obvious bonus), but > to make sure that they provided regexps at all. It'd be nice to wave > the CL spec at people and say, "See, it supports regexps, so tell me > again what it is Perl can offer me over CL?" What is the problem with using a widely available regular expression package written in Common Lisp? (I am actually really curious, and do not ask this rhetorically.) Incidentally, Perl can offer a million morons who are willing to do stupid chores that no thinking person would ever consider worthwhile. This keeps all kinds of progress in the software industry back, because instead of improving the ways software produces logs (to produce log entries with sufficiently good keys that they could be considered to be in some normal form, suitable for database-like access paradigms), or configuration file formats (to perhaps arrive at a common language, even a _rationalized_ XML would suffice), everyone knows that they do not have to think about any of these things -- some Perl programmer with a very narrow focus and little clue will always glue things together for you. Common Lisp cannot compete in that market. ///