Re: member returns list

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>
> writes:
>
>> There were a lot of variants and propositions,
>> amongst all the lisp dialects.
>
> What was the reason (were the reasons) for this
> proliferation of different Lisps, the "Lisp wars"?

Because each implementation worked on a different machine with a
different OS (if an OS was available at all).


>> Then starting from 1984, some interested
>> corporations and institutes invested a lot of money
>> (in form of salaries to detached employees), to form
>> a standardization commitee and decide on this all
>> all similar kinds of discrepancies that made porting
>> lisp programs from one lisp to the other a PITA.
>> They worked hard, for ten years. Then money was
>> exhausted, so they finalized an ANSI Common Lisp
>> standard in 1994.
>
> And somewhere around then, the by far best language in
> the world started to be completely marginalized so
> that now, when I say it is the language I like the
> most without competition, either people (now I talk
> computer people) don't know it or are eyes wide
> mouth open.
>
>> or member* in emacs lisp since RMS doesn't want to
>> rejoin the common community of lispers
>
> What is the story about that?

Ask him.

But basically, he started GNU emacs and designing emacs lisp slightly
beforem the CL standardization process started, and it was far from
obviouos that it would succeed (it took ten years!).


For example, Franz, Inc. switched over to CL only after 1985 and had CL
available only in 1986.

http://franz.com/about/company.history.lhtml
http://emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsHistory

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a
dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to
keep the man from touching the equipment.” -- Carl Bass CEO Autodesk