Keeping CL and Scheme straight in your head

Question

Depending on my mood I seem to waffle back and forth between wanting a Lisp-1 and a Lisp-2. Unfortunately beyond the obvious name space differences, this leaves all kinds of amusing function name/etc problems you run into. Case in point, trying to write some code tonight I tried to do (map #'function listvar) which, of course, doesn't work in CL, at all. Took me a bit to remember I wanted mapcar, not map. Of course it doesn't help when slime/emacs shows map IS defined as something, though obviously not the same function at all.

So, pointers on how to minimize this short of picking one or the other and sticking with it?

Answer 1

Map is more general than mapcar, for example you could do the following rather than using mapcar:

(map 'list #'function listvar)

How do I keep scheme and CL separate in my head? I guess when you know both languages well enough you just know what works in one and not the other. Despite the syntactic similarities they are quite different languages in terms of style.

Answer 2

I'm definitely aware that there are syntactic differences, though I'm certainly not fluent enough yet to automatically use them, making the code look much more similar currently ;-).

And I had a feeling your answer would be the case, but can always hope for a shortcut <_<.

Answer 3

The easiest way to keep both languages straight is to do your thinking and code writing in Common Lisp. Common Lisp code can be converted into Scheme code with relative ease; however, going from Scheme to Common Lisp can cause a few headaches. I remember once where I was using a letrec in Scheme to store both variables and functions and had to split it up into the separate CL functions for the variable and function namespaces respectively.

In all practicality though I don't make a habit of writing CL code, which makes the times that I do have to all the more painful.

Answer 4

Well, I think that as soon you get enough experience in both languages this becomes a non-issue (just with similar natural languages, like Italian and Spanish). If you usually program in one language and switch to the other only occasionally, then unfortunately you are doomed to write Common Lisp in Scheme or vice versa ;)

One thing that helps is to have a distinct visual environment for both languages, using syntax highlighting in some other colors etc. Then at least you will always know whether you are in Common Lisp or Scheme mode.

Answer 5

I'm currently trying to switch over to CL as well and having the same issues lol