Grzegorz Chrupala <grzegorz@pithekos.net> wrote:
+---------------
| I think roughly the difference in preferences described above is
| plausible, but there are certainly also people who prefer scheme for
| *practical* reasons. From my newbie perspective, some of those are
| that it is smaller, has many more implementations (most of them free)...
+---------------

CMUCL & CLISP are both free, as are the trial or "personal" versions
of most commercial implementations.

+---------------
| and I have the impression that is generally more suitable as a
| lightweight scripting language.
+---------------

Well, times change. Given how well the VM systems on modern Unixes --
{Free,Net,Open}BSD, Linux, etc. -- cache executables and mmap'd files
(used to map the Lisp image), even "large" Common Lisp system (e.g., CMUCL)
run very quickly after the first run of the day. In fact, on my Athlon
desktop at home with FreeBSD, when running the same[1] "#!/interp"
script in MzScheme v.103 and CMUCL-18e, the "time" command reports
both of them being about the same, between 10-20ms, with CMUCL being
on average just slightly *faster*!

Said another way, I use both CLISP & CMUCL all the time as "lightweight
scripting languages"...


-Rob

[1] Modulo tiny changes for differing syntax.

-----
Rob Warnock, PP-ASEL-IA		<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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