RE [AA question on Lisp, Scheme, Guile, eLisp etc]

[Ariel Rios <ariel arcavia com>]

>>I have a very basic question. What is the relationship between all these
>>languages, namely
>>[1] Lisp, [2] eLisp [3] Scheme [4] Guile
>>[5] Script-fu [6] Common Lisp

Lisp was created in the 60's by McCarthy based in Church's lambda
calculus. Many different implementations appeared and they started to be
so different that a programm written for one dialect of lisp
did not run in another dialect. 

The two most used dialects of lisp used today are Scheme and Common Lisp. 

Scheme was created on the MIT; it is a powerful yet simple programming language. 
Lots of implementations are available including Guile, Chez, SCM, Dr Scheme, 
Mit Scheme and SIOD.

Guile is an scheme interpreter widely used in the GNOME project in 
applications like gnumeric, galway, gnucash, etc. Gtk and GNOME
bindings are available. In the future Guile / Scheme will replace elisp
as the emacs scripting language.

Script fu are a nice collection of scheme functions implemented
under GIMP to do scripting. It is the only GTK application (or GNOME)
that uses SIOD (scheme in one defun) instead of GUile.

Elisp is a lisp dialect of emacs created for doing emacs scripting.

Common Lisp is the industrial lisp standard. It includes nice features
like an object system, variables types, lots of functions, etc.
As far as I know there are GTK bindings for Common Lisp.
Also most of the AI work is done in Common Lisp. Please note that
today Common Lisp is commonly refered as Lisp. Plain old Lisp is no longer
used.

Some useful links:

http://www.schemers.org
http://www.lisp.org
http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html

Ariel