George Neuner <gneuner2/@/comcast.net> writes: > On Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:54:57 -0800, John Nagle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > >> Actually, the ability to "fix a running program" [in Lisp] isn't >>that useful in real life. It's more cool than useful. Editing a >>program from a break was more important back when computers were slower >>and just rerunning from the beginning was expensive. > > Speak for yourself. > > The ability to patch a running program is very useful for certain > types of embedded applications. Not every program having high > availability requirements can be restarted quickly, or can be > implemented reasonably using multiple servers or processes to allow > rolling restarts.
And in applications like IDEs, dynamically loaded functions are very important. Improving Emacs is vastly easier because Emacs Lisp is interpreted. You can make a small change to a function and quickly determine its effect. That's one reason (among many others :) I have not switched to GPS (which is written in Ada). -- -- Stephe -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list