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Differences between Arc and Lisp
1 point by Jonsul 5631 days ago | 5 comments
Keep hearing a lot about Arc. It has a lot of buzz lol. Anyways I'm currently learning CL and was just wonder what exactly are the main differences between Lisp and Arc?

I'm sure this has been asked a lot but I went back several pages on the forum and couldn't find anything on it. I found a faq somewhere but it didn't have anything about this. It might be a good idea to put a faq on the main site that answers this.

Thanks



1 point by zck 5631 days ago | link

I'm going to nitpick on your terminology, 'cause it's important. Arc is a dialect of Lisp. There are many Lisps (Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, AutoLISP, Clojure, etc.), but I'm going to go with you meaning Common Lisp.

Have you checked out the tutorial? (http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt) It's a good introduction, and you can diff what you see with what you would write in Common Lisp in your head pretty easily, as the code examples are small.

A lot of the stuff on pg's Arc page (http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html) goes into detail about how he's designing it.

But for a specific list of differences (e.g., "Arc is a Lisp-1, so you don't refer to functions as #'function-name"), I don't know of one.

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1 point by evanrmurphy 5630 days ago | link

There was a post on Hacker News yesterday comparing various Lisps, but Arc wasn't included. [1] I actually started a column for Arc in the comments, but it's incomplete and probably has some inaccuracies. [2]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1280038 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281303

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1 point by evanrmurphy 5630 days ago | link

The original "Arc Challenge" thread [1] has a lot of information about Arc vs. other languages, including lively debate about the merits of their respective differences (and about the merits of the competition itself).

[1] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=722

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1 point by evanrmurphy 5630 days ago | link

GaryLensman has a provocative comment in the subthread http://arclanguage.org/item?id=858, in which he argues that Arc is essentially a custom DSL exercise routine to PLT Scheme programmers.

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1 point by Jonsul 5630 days ago | link

Sorry maybe I should of wrote "...between that Lisp and Arc"

I'm a college student just started learning CL, my only background is Javascript with a light amount of C, and so it's not fully apparent to me when looking at the tut. I know Arc is a dialect of Lisp, so a lot of the differences are just implementation of how you type certain things. Just wondering what are the benefits over current dialects?

Since I plan on actively pursuing Lisp programing, I wanted to get a jist of what's happening on the scene. Plus I hear some people at places tauting Arc as the future of Lisp, mostly non-lispers I think, but still it peaked my interest.

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