Re: Writing to buffer/file

[naugiedoggie]

On Sep 14, 10:33 am, p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)
wrote:
> Michael Powe <michael+g...@trollope.org> writes:
> > I sort of took this up as a challenge after reading an article the
> > other day comparing perl vs elisp for text processing, in which elisp
> > was given the nod as the superior language.  I could write this text
> > processor pretty easily in Python.  But it would not be nearly as
> > compact as what I have so far.  
>
> Locally (ie. for a small function like yours), lisp may not be more
> concise or easier to use than perl or python.   But given the ability of
> lisp for abstraction (data abstraction, and functional abstraction, most
> languages have it, but lisp thanks to its homoiconicity and its macro,
> provides also syntactic and metalinguistic abstraction), as soon as you
> have more complex processing to implement, you can better factorize
> things our, and obtain a more concise and cleaner way to express your
> processings.  In the mean while, you will have developed a little
> library or language designed to implement your specific kind of
> processing.  (Or put to use an existing library or language extension).

Hello,

I have some frustrations sometimes because I do a lot of these kinds
of "text extractions" as part of researching client issues.  That is,
in fact, the point of this exercise.  But, I haven't been able to get
library together.  I used to do these extractions in perl, got sick of
that and switched to Java, which I have been using for quite a few
years.  But sometimes it's a bit much to write an entire application
(with all that implies) for a one-off like this ... although Java
development does offer tools that make the process pretty quick.
Lately, I've been using python and trying to get at its functional
aspect.  I'm taking as my mantra:  "Mutable stateful objects is the
new spaghetti code." (Rich Hickey)

Everything seems to lead back to Lisp.  ;-)

Thanks.

mp