[Bese-devel] UCW vs Seaside (and Scheme)

[Robert Marlow]

Just adding to what's already been said to expand on Scheme's native
support for continuations. 

Scheme's interesting not just for its native support for continuations
but also for its tail-call optimisation. This can mean considerable
time and space savings during heavy continuation use compared to a
language lacking tail-call optimisation since it recognises that many
of the extra function calls of continuation passing style need never
return.

Quite a number of common lisp implementations do support tail-call
optimisation (usually after you've made some declaims) so it may not
even be an issue with UCW with these implementations, assuming UCW's
rewrite rules take advantage of tail-calls. Furthermore, for
most web applications the time and space loss is small enough to be
negligible compared to getting all the other benefits of common
lisp. It may be more of a problem for web applications needing many,
many calls and answers but such web applications would be rather
uncommon on the web (pardon the pun). 

I'm just talking from my general understanding of continuations
though, so Marco or someone can probably correct me on some
points.


At Sat, 3 Sep 2005 04:21:47 -0400,
Waldo Rubinstein wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I'm fairly new to both Lisp and Smalltalk (less than 6 months  
> experience in each). The reason for my interest in these is because I  
> feel, from what I have been reading, that both Seaside and UCW offer  
> more practical solutions to the real-life problems I need to solve  
> for developing web-based custom apps.
> 
> I have to say I have spent more time learning about Smalltalk/Seaside  
> than I have invested in Lisp/UCW. However, somehow it feels Lisp/UCW  
> seem to provide a better roadmap and more stable platform.
> 
> Then, after googling a bit more, I came across certain articles that  
> point out some differences between Lisp and Scheme. Particularly on  
> the topic of continuations and the fact that these are native to  
> Scheme vs to both Smalltalk and Lisp. Then I wondered, if what I'm  
> looking for is better support for continuation-based development,  
> should I be looking into Scheme?
> 
> Before I spent much time looking into Scheme, I decided to quickly  
> glance at Scheme's support for some of the minimum requirements I  
> have for web app development. For example, I need to access MySQL and/ 
> or Postgres databases as well as the easy manipulation (mainly  
> generation) of PDF and CSV files. Also, I would like to start using  
> object databases more than relational databases. I didn't find much  
> support for these in Scheme. However, I did come across some projects  
> for both Lisp and Smalltalk to support my needs, which brought me  
> back to wanting to learn more about UCW and Seaside.
> 
> At this point, I'm wondering if there is anyone in this list that can  
> shed some light into clearing up where I should be going. I've always  
> been fascinated with Lisp, but never spent enough time to learn it.  
> Now that I have some time, I'd like to know where I should be  
> investing my time more wisely (Lisp, Smalltalk, Scheme). I don't know  
> if I should really rule out Scheme and may be someone could also  
> comment on it.
> 
> Any information you can provide will really help, even if you can  
> just point me to where I can read more and learn more to make a more  
> informed decision.
> 
> Thank you in advance,
> Waldo
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