Re: Scheme is too complicated

[Russ McManus <russell.mcmanus@gs.com>]

Jay Glascoe <jglascoe@jay.giss.nasa.gov> writes:

> <don asbestos suit>

Well that shouldn't be necessary.

> Scheme is weird.  

OK, I'll agree with that one.  Compared to the non-portable assemblers
people program with, scheme is most unusual.

> Although it's weakly typed, it's not a VHLL like Perl/Python.

I detect an incorrect application of the contrapositive.

Perl/Python not like scheme.
Perl/Python are VHLL's.
Does _not_ imply that scheme is not a VHLL.

I don't see any actual reasons why you think that scheme is not a
VHLL.  (There are some reasons that are worthy of discussion, but you
didn't mention any).

> In my experience, functional style Scheme code is concise and, unless
> you're careful, slow.  

This is an attribute of a particular implementation, not an intrinsic
property of the language.  Let me assure you that there are screaming
fast scheme implementations out there, that can beat C in numerical
code in certain cases, even when the programmer uses a functional
style.  Search DejaNews for the postings of Siskind on
comp.lang.scheme.

> otoh, imperative Scheme is usually about half the size of comparable
> C code (a loop is a loop, a car is a car...), and it's about 3/4 the
> size if don't count the C declarations.

Once you start writing more scheme/lisp, I would expect that your
scheme programs will start to be 3-5 times smaller than the same C
program.  Yes I mean 3-5 times.  I hope you continue to learn about
scheme; it will expand your programming horizons.  Grab a copy of
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and go.

-russ

--
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footsteps of giants.