I remember I was very excited about Java 1.5 when it came out, because
of all the syntactic sugar it provided. I was tired of typing
for (int i = 0; i < foo.length; i++) {
Bar b = foo[i];
// do stuff with b
}
1.5 introduced the foreach loop syntax, so that I could instead write
for (Bar b : foo)
// do stuff with b
At the time this was great, but on reflection it took a very long time
for such a simple source-level improvement to be added to java.
Wouldn't it be nice if I could write my own version of this instead of
waiting for Sun to do it? In a lisp, this is trivial. Let's imagine
that clojure had an ugly java-looking (for) syntax, instead of the
lovely list-comprehension style it has now. Maybe it looks like this:
(for i 0 (< i (.length foo)) (inc i)
(let [bar (aget foo i)]
(comment do stuff with bar)))
And I've noticed I write the above code a lot and would like it to be
shorter. It's not hard to write a foreach macro myself:
(defmacro foreach [[name array] & body]
`(for i# 0 (< i# (.length ~array)) (inc i#)
(let [~name (aget ~array i#)]
(do ~...@body))))
(foreach [bar foo]
(comment do stuff with bar))
I don't know anything about Scala, but try doing this in java and
you'll see why lisps are so powerful.
On Dec 7, 3:10 pm, SpiderPig <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi,
> I was wondering if there are any good examples that show what
> advantages clojure/lisp has over most other programming languages.
> I mean a piece of code that couldn't be easily translated into e.g.
> scala or java. A program that would take much longer to develop in
> other languages due to the unique properties of lisp. Is there such
> code out there? Basically all the clojure code I have seen so far
> could be translated to scala without any major problems and would take
> about the same amount of time to write. I'm not talking about
> differences in the API. That could easily be fixed.
> In other words are there good examples that show that writing software
> in a lisp language is a lot faster then writing the same program in a
> language like scala.
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