Subject: Re: new to lisp From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 10:07:13 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3225694045810240@naggum.net> * Nils Goesche <ngo@cartan.de> | ACK. I also think that one of the main reasons why knowing C is so | important is that all those Lisp FFI interfaces connect to /C/ :-) Although clearly tongue-in-cheek, this is true only because C is the predominant Other Language as seen from Common Lisp. Back when Fortran was the Other Language, Common Lisp competed aggressively with it in its domain, with a lot of mathy stuff that I doubt is used very much. Now that all that computing is about is burning billions of Hz in GUIs, Common Lisp needs to interface to the lingua franca of those tools | Certainly. An open question remains, which perspective should come | first. Frankly, I believe the most low level one the student still | enjoys would be best. I cannot parse the last sentence, but for what it might be worth, Donald Knuth thinks assembly language is such a great vehicle for understanding computing that he has invented his own in order to teach people The Art of Computer Programming. I tend to agree, except that I would _so_ have loved TAoCP to have been based on, say, the PDP-10 instruction set and design rather than the el bizarro toy computer that MIX sort of codes to. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.