D and Lisp

[Bruno Medeiros]

Denton Cockburn wrote:
> Hey guys,
> 
> I'm in University and am about to start my Ph.D.
> I know Lisp, and I've been on the D newsgroup for a few months following 
> its growth. For ones that know Lisp, what can you say is the experience 
> programming in D compared to programming in Lisp?  What are some of the 
> frustrations of D in comparison? Some of the joys?  What do you most miss 
> from Lisp that you wish D had?
> 
> I'm trying to decide which to use for my thesis work.
> Should I delve fully into D, or run with Lisp?
> What would you use to convince a Lisper to try D?
> 
> Hope that wasn't too many questions.

D is likely by far the closest to LISP of the static (non-dynamic) 
family languages.
D has advanced meta-programming capabilities. It also lambdas (called 
function/delegate literals in D) but they currently have some 
restrictions: delegate literals that access function contexts are not 
valid after the function returns, since function contexts are 
stack-allocated (and not heap-allocated like in Lisp). This is planned 
to be fixed eventually.
You should also be mindful of int and float arithmetic, since these 
types cannot hold a number of any size, something which for what I've 
been told, many Lispers find extremely unclean. But since D has operator 
overloading, you can create a BigNum like class and work with it almost 
as easily as a primitive numerical type.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - MSc in CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D