I wish the Common Lisp camp wasn't so insistent on equating "Lisp" to "Common Lisp." It's annoying having to tiptoe around them by saying "Lisp-like language."
But that's what Common Lisp is: it's the common Lisp-like language which (should have) united all the disparate dialects of Lisp.
> It's annoying having to tiptoe around them by saying "Lisp-like language."
What's annoying to me is that people keep on sinking time an effort into new Lisp-like languages instead of just using Common Lisp (or, gasp, working on a next-generation CL).
There's a lot of hard-earned wisdom in CL; even the majority of the cruft exists for good reasons.
You immediately know who the idiots are, so you don't need to waste any time finding that out for yourself.
I put Clojure in the same category, if we examine it outside the Java ecosystem, a language that is the definition of "premature optimization" (all the concurrency and immutable datastructure features are available as libraries in CL) and has no business existing in a universe where CL exists.
But of course people want to work with Java and so on and so forth. Tight Java interop is what makes Clojure worthy of existence and of course, why would any sane Lisper want to work in the Java ecosystem?
Give it a different name. Not every random language which happens to use parentheses in some way needs to be called Lisp.
Notice something?
These all have Lisp in their name. They all share a core language.
None of those is Common Lisp, but Common Lisp is directly related to them, since it also shares the same core language.
Common Lisp can easily run Lisp code from 50 years ago.
Newlisp can't.
I'll repeat it for you: Lisp dialects are defined by a common core language.
Newlisp does not have that core language. Even if it uses the same name for functionality, it does different things:
Lisp:
(cons 1 2) -> (1 . 2)
(cons 1 2) -> (1 2)
(+ 1.2 2) -> 3.2
That's just the trivial stuff.
It's basically impossible to run any Lisp code in newlisp without completely rewriting it.
When I say Lisp, I'm talking about a language which is in the tradition of McCarthy's Lisp, where I don't need to throw away my books, implementations, libraries, applications.
newlisp is a derived language just like ML, Logo, Javascript, Racket, Clojure and countless other languages. Just like Java is not a C dialect, but somehow influenced by it.
Again, zero code of the past fifty+ years of Lisp runs in Clojure. iT is fully incompatible with any Lisp dialect. It shares zero lines of code.
Don't believe what people tell you, think yourself. if you had a language, which uses { and }, would you call it a C, if it is 100% incompatible to any line of C written out there?
For some reason some people think any random incompatible language with parentheses is a Lisp. That's because they use some completely unspecific definition of Lisp, which is based on vague features, but which has no practical consequences.
No, but nobody else would either. For Lisp and Forth dialects, people seem to accept that they are not all backwards compatible with a specific implementation or spec, but are the same family of languages. [1]
Clojure's and Racket's official docs both refer to the languages as Lisp dialects (Racket) or Lisps (Clojure). Other reputable sources also consider them to be dialects of Lisp.
If it doesn't meet your own prescriptive criteria for being called a Lisp, that's fine, but the parent is only being pragmatic in using the same sense that is widely used and accepted.
[1] FWIW, I've always read "is a Lisp"/"Lisps" as "is a Lisp dialect"/"Lisp dialects" and think that most others do as well. Not necessarily married to implementation details or compatibility.
There is some life beyond Common Lisp :).
Languages like Standard Lisp, Franz Lisp, ISLisp, Eulisp, Emacs Lisp, Visual Lisp are in the Lisp tradition and share a core language.
newlisp is a different language. Call it ParenthesesScript, ContextScript or something like that.
Conses are different in newlisp, but it certainly does have linked lists:
> In newLISP, there are no dotted pairs. Instead, each newLISP cell contains one object and a pointer to another object if the cell is part of a list.
> different evaluation model
That one is true, yes.
> no GC
No, but it implements McCarthy's original intent through the ORO scheme. NewLisp's ORO thing is very annoying if you ask me, but it does its job; it achieves the same thing that McCarthy mentioned in his paper: "This process [...] is more convenient for the programmer than a system in which he has to keep track of and erase unwanted lists. Its efficiency depends upon not coming close to exhausting the available memory with accessible lists etc."
Let's not delude ourselves here. NewLisp is not necessarily one of the "better" Lisp implementations, but it has S-expressions, Scheme-like function application and automatic memory management. I think that's reason enough to call it SomethingLisp.
These are different. newlisp seems to have a list cell, which then points to linked content cells.
A mechanism which is different from any other Lisp dialect.
No, it does. Linked list are the fundamental data structure; the difference with respect to linked list from other lisps is, in fact, that in newLisp linked lists are fundamental, not just one application of cons cells, so you can't have a cons cell where cdr is not a proper list.