Re: Lisp as procedural language

Can someone explain why we have a lisp.sgml file in our docs? Seems it
descripes a 3rd party Emacs interface. I don't think we should start
distributing docs for software we don't distribute. Can I remove it?

> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
> > This must have been an artifact from the time when part of the Postgres
> > system was written in Lisp. A Lisp procedural language never actually
> > existed in PostgreSQL.
>
> [ Digs in archives... ] The pg_language entry that Vladimir refers to
> was still present as late as Postgres 6.5 --- but I agree that it must
> have been vestigial long before that. Certainly, at one time large
> chunks of Postgres *were* written in Lisp, and I imagine that the
> pg_language entry did something useful when that was true. But it was
> dead code in Postgres 4.2 (1994), which is the oldest source I have;
> there is no Lisp code remaining in 4.2.
>
> It'd theoretically be possible to support Lisp in the same way as we
> currently support Tcl, Perl, etc. The hard part is to find a suitable
> interpreter that is designed to be dynamically linked into other
> applications. Perl still hasn't got that quite right, and I imagine
> it's an even more foreign idea for most Lisp systems...

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
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