Re: Lisp as a procedural language?

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 12:56 PM, John DeSoi <desoi@pgedit.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 19, 2008, at 1:27 PM, Douglas McNaught wrote:
>
>> SBCL is a big and very sophisticated program.  It's designed to be a
>> self-contained Lisp system and has (AFAIK) no concessions to
>> "embeddability".  It uses threads internally, and plays games with the
>> memory map to make GC more efficient.  Only a small part of it is
>> written in C, and the rest is Lisp compiled directly to binary. It
>> would almost certainly be a heroic project to make it coexist with a
>> PostgreSQL backend process--like Java, but much worse.
>>
>> It's not likely that any of the "serious" Common Lisp systems would be
>> easily embedded in Postgres.
>
>
> Probably the ideal implementation would be ECL:
>
> http://ecls.sourceforge.net/
>
> It is designed to be a full Common Lisp implementation that can be easily
> embedded in other environments.
>
> It generates C source code so you could have the option of developing with
> Lisp and then generating C language functions for additional speed or source
> code security.
>
> Not open source, but I've played around a bit with integrating LispWorks to
> get Lisp a procedural language.
>
> I'd like to see Lisp as a procedural language, but I'm not very proficient
> with C. If anyone is interested in leading the way, I would be happy to
> help.
>
>
> John DeSoi, Ph.D.
>

One of the Java-as-a-procedural-language options uses RMI to get the
server talking to a separate JVM, where the actual function processing
gets done. Could a PL/Lisp work similarly (and would it be anything
approaching a good idea...)?

- Josh / eggyknap