RUBY vs COMMON LISP

[fft1976]

On Aug 3, 1:19 am, p... at informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)
wrote:
> fft1976 <fft1... at gmail.com> writes:
> > By the way, here is in 1 line of BF, a complete BF reader that is able
> > to
> > read all the BF syntax needed to write it:
>
> > ,+[-.,+]
>
> > Here's how to try it:
>
> > $ sudo apt-get install bf
> > $ cat > reader.bf
> > ,+[-.,+]
> > $ bf reader.bf < reader.bf
>
> > Your 150 lines don't look very impressive now, do they?
>
> > Ruby < Lisp <<< BF!
>
> I specified a syntactic reader.  Not just a reader.

It is a syntactic reader. BF's syntax is just a sequence of
characters. If you throw in illegal characters, the behavior is
"undefined". Lisp's syntax is more complicated: it's a tree of
identifiers (in its idealized form; of course, Common Lisp had to fuck
it up). Ruby's and Python's syntaxes are even more complicated.

The above was to illustrate the wrongness of your argument that the
length of a self-parser determines the usefulness of the language.
Hell, I know that BF can be a little *too* awesome.

By the way, Python's syntax is much better than Ruby's. Dollar signs
in front of variables? WTF were the designers smoking? That's like
Perl! Haven't you learned your lesson?

Python's syntax might even be better than Lisp's, but it's certainly
harder to parse.