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DotLisp - A .NET Implementation of LISP

Comments

Stavanja said:

I also don't have time at the moment to complete the things I intend to do with DotLisp, but I have found it rather good as an ad hoc scripting language, and along the way it allows me to keep learning about .NET when I'm stuck with VB6 in my day-to-day work.

For example, yesterday I submitted 141 spam (!) to SpamCop, in a bulk email. It replied rather quickly and the email containing the reports seemed small enough to warrant me trying to confirm all messages were processed. I suppose I should have opened the email in a good text editor that could return the number of times a certain string (the MIME separator) was present, but I don't have such an editor installed (though Word could probably do it!). So I cut a DotLisp routine that looped over a string with IndexOf and confirmed all was OK. (Then I found I already had code that enumerated all the positions of the string, and I just needed to count that list.)

During this I noticed ArgumentException has a perfectly good default message that you can't seem to use if you wat to specify an argument name; clearly a case for a default argument in a constructor that the CLR team decided against. (However, I've now looked at the .NET 1.1 documentation and realised the subclasses of ArgumentException do not have this problem, and should clearly be used where possible. Then, of course, there's the point that we users shouldn't generate any exceptions that are subclasses of SystemException.)

September 25, 2004 8:34 PM