Subject: Re: Best combination of {hardware / lisp implementation / operating system} From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 28 Oct 2002 00:50:10 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3244755010076280@naggum.no> * Advance Australia Dear | Although I am remunerated adequately for what I do at work, I find it | difficult to justify US $ 900 = AU $ 1800 for a purely hobbyist tool. * Thomas F. Burdick | If you're trying to imply that LW costs $1800, that's misleading. It was not misleading to people who have become used to deal with multiple currencies, but to those who are not, please note that $ is /meaningless/ outside of the United States. That is, there is no telling which currency people refer to with this symbol. Those who have become used to deal with multiple currencies also favor using ISO 4217 to refer to them. ISO 4217 is based on ISO 3166, which, with the exception of the country that does not believe it is world's number one most backward technological country and the country that thinks it is the number one most advanced country, namely the UK and the US, respectively, is the top-level domain name. That is, if you know the top-level domain name of the country, you know the first two letters of their international standard currency code and the third is usually pretty easy to intuit, but if not, looking it up is not hard given this simple guideline. The UK is of course GB. The international standard currency code for U.S. dollars is USD. The international standard currency code for Australian dollars is AUD. If you want to write a currency in standard notation. the currency code prefixes the amount: USD 900.00 or AUD 1800.00. Like so many other things that normally require international cooperation, like bombing a country back to from the bronze age to the stone age, the United States is among the hardest countries to convert to standards not of their own making. It is partly because of the stubbornness of the symbolic value of "$" that the European Union needed their own stupid currency symbol and screwed up character sets to boot. The Euro is better known as EUR, however, and there /is/ a .EU top-level domain, too. The age-old and very good question "If I want to call Europe, who do I call?" also has an answer these days. | Some people don't have budgets that allow them to save this amount of | money in anything like a reasonable amount of time -- but most poor folks | don't complain that their computers are missing bells and whistles | compared to a bourgeois. We're talking about the *best* Lisp system, not | the cheapest adequate system. $900 for "the best" is a damn good deal. Matter of fact, I am unable to grasp why so many stinking poor people want to use the commercial Common Lisp environments and come here to complain about it, alongside their inevitable whining that they are not /really/ interested in Common Lisp, it is just a "hobby" and that they would not use Common Lisp for anything productive if they did /get/ their hands on the expensive environments. If I attempt to understand it, I only come up with evil and destructive reasons like people who do not want something that they cannot get to /exist/ to begin with. There are a lot of those people around; I would not expect them to become interesed in computer programming and Common Lisp in particular, however. -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.