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Comment by J_McQuade | Hacker News Reader

Maybe there's something to newLisp, but any time I see a group with that flavor of persecution complex ("All the criticism is wrong because they just don't understand!") I take pause.

To be honest, that could describe almost the entire (vocal) Lisp community these days, and I say this as a quite embarrassingly commited Lisp fan and user.

Anyway, I wouldn't say that dynamic scope is evil, but to most Lisp users is does just feel a little backwards. Un-natural, if you will. That's just one of the reasons why everyone secretly (or not-so-secretly) longs for the never-coming day when emacs lisp can just 'go away'.

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Lispers can bicker over technicalities and matters of taste, but any programmer of a Lisp dialect would prefer to move to another, instead of using something else like Java or C++. At least I would. Even small Scheme-like dialects that are embedded in big libraries and industrial applications (stuff like Lush[1]) is very palatable to any Lisper (Arc, Goo and other curiosities are also interesting.)

Not so with NewLisp. It's fundamentally broken in ways that would be make me look forward to ASP.NET over it. To give you an example; to calculate the value of Pi, they suggests one fire an external process and run the Unix bc(1) command to do that :-P http://www.newlisp.org/index.cgi?page=Code_Snippets

[1] http://lush.sourceforge.net/

To someone who wants to use newLISP for calculating Pi to the nth digit, it might appear "fundamentally broken." Of course I don't know why on earth you would want to do that in the first place, using a program/language specialized for such a task would be a far brighter idea, as such, the doc you refers to correctly suggests using the 'bc' program.

However, for someone who wants a Lisp for rapid web development, newLISP is a dream come true:

http://www.rundragonfly.com

As emphasized in the article: use the language that's most appropriate for the task at hand.

newLISP also has a bignum module (with 64-bit support):

http://www.newlisp.org/code/modules/gmp.lsp.html

And if you want the value of pi, why not just use the same method invoked by bc in that code snippet: 4*atan(1)

http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/newlisp_manual.html#atan

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