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Date:Mon Aug 4 23:18:34 1999 
Subject:Re: Why are there so many versions of lisp ? 
From:Rudi Schlatte 
Volume-ID:990804.05 

rurban@xarch.tu-graz.ac.at (Reini Urban) writes:

> it actually looks like to be a better choice for our universities
> software engineering course (plus Compilers, AI and such) where they
> currently use ML (SML) and then in the second year java.

Worse than that - it's second semester :-) BTW, the enlightened
professor holding the course now will retire in a year (he was on the
PL/1 design team and knows his compiler theory), and heaven knows
which language(s) his successor will teach ...  We'll teach the poor
ones C++ before you can say "industry standard".

> They want to touch lisp and ML, so poplog would be fine choice.
> http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/courses/popinfo/primer/node10.html is good
> url.

I'll have a look, thanks.

> With Poplog people could learn a decent editor, a decent choice of
> languages, a big library and some taste for the real-world as well,
> which they lack with SML now and to which they are overexposed with
> java then in the second year. and the ML freaks could continue using
> the poplog ML. the docs are really fine! you really see the grounds
> of being used as a teaching language at sussex.
> 
> maybe students will understand the difference between CLOS and
> C++/java finally then.

"Why do we have to learn this? Nobody uses this! And Emacs is so
complicated, I can't get any work done!"  (The students without prior
experience are a joy to work with, but the ones spoiled by Windows 98
can be painful.)  (I will be a teaching assistant, why do you ask? :-)

Rudi