Why Lisp Programming is Better in BricsCAD than AutoCAD

Bangalore, India

I have done extensive programming in Lisp and have used both AutoCAD and BricsCAD platforms for testing my apps. I find advantages in using BricsCAD for the most part of the Lisp coding & development cycle. I have listed some reasons here:

1: If you populate a DCL element with an undefined Lisp variable, AutoCAD freezes and you must kill the app, BricsCAD just throws an error and tells you what and where the error is. In AutoCAD, it is difficult to guess where the error occurs. AutoCAD punishes unreferenced variables in a DCL with nothing less than a complete freeze.

2: When your Lisp program crashes in BricsCAD, it leaves an automatic trace of the functions that were called from the start of the command. This helps the user know more precisely where the crash occurred.

In AutoCAD, you get to see only the last error message just at the point of crash (unless you use Visual Lisp, but I have other reasons not wanting to use Visual Lisp).

3: Some of the code that I develop require testing on a new drawing or when existing ones are opened. These require a CAD boot-up and initialization which takes significantly longer in AutoCAD than in BricsCAD. A testing cycle on BricsCAD is much faster for me, than in AutoCAD.

4: Lisp programmers often complain about the tenacity with which the command line disappears and hides itself in the 2013 and 2014 versions of AutoCAD. The command line is an important debug window where much of the action happens and must be seen. Switching over to BricsCAD overcomes these limitations, as the command window behaves much like in older versions of AutoCAD - always accessible and resourceful.

I don't miss AutoCAD, as far as Lisp programming is concerned except when I need to check if I have left some variables global. I find the Visual Lisp editor very useful for this task.

Of course, these are some of the small comforts in Lisp as I experienced it in BricsCAD, purely looked at from one view (during debugging).

The bigger story, and the power of Lisp in BricsCAD has been explained in this post as well as this one.

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Comments

[knosperos]

Hi,
as a AutoCad long-term User (since v9) I can assure you, lisp debugging was only slightly easier then, if one did it only from the cmd line. In a bad error case, you could get several hundred lines of spaghetti lisp recursive from the point the error happened.
The way to get this output still exists, but is hidden in some error trap settings.
However, I do not really understand why one would not use Visual Lisp, as it is integrated and easy to call by the VLIDE command.
I also cannot follow the "with which the command line disappears and hides itself", but that may have been a behavior of that versions which I did not realize then.
I sympathise with the way Bricscad provides a cheap Autocad alternative on a broad functional spectrum, albeit there is no way to get arx applications running without a recompile to .brx with their libraries.