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Comment by retroafroman | Hacker News Reader

You can still run Lisp commands on the commandline interface in AutoCAD. Or even as you type out command inputs. So for example, if you know that you just put in 187 for length, but the next line needs to be double that, you can type (* 2 187) when it's time to put in the length and AutoCAD calculates it.

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I thought they turned it into a license feature (so LT doesn't have it, only the full version does)?

But yes, I found AutoLisp to be very useful for automating things. The place I used to work for had to have the CNC machines cut out differently sized shapes from a library of shapes, so I created functions to draw each library shape for me quickly.

This is a lot easier than trying to form four mutually tangent circular arcs into an oval by constructing everything by hand.

You are correct. I describe AutoCad LT as either "Fisher Price" AutoCAD, or AutoCAD without the useful stuff. Most people that use AutoCAD might as well be using Etch-A-Sketch...

I know... I had a hard time once trying to explain that the newer LT version was completely worthless to me because I needed the AutoLisp from the real version and that the "upgrade" gave me no useful features and merely made it impossible to automate anything.

Sure, I could construct everything by hand, but that's pretty unreasonable when I'm redoing the same basic shapes all day.

LT is the follow on to AutoSketch and marketed to those who don't find value from working in 3d. AutoDesk upbranded the product and raised the price point when they renamed it, and a lot of people who say they use AutoCad are using LT "instead". In fairness, there are a lot of people using AutoCad with color based plotting (style based was introduced with Acad2000 in 1999) and who don't use those "new features" like Paper Space and Xrefs (introduced in r11 in 1990). Making things is very much bound by traditions.

To be honest, when I used it, AutoLisp was really the only feature I cared about other than drawing basic 2D shapes. You could have left me with only points, lines, arcs and dimension text, as long as I had lisp to automate it all.

Yes, LISP is only present in Autocad Professional.

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