TABLE OF CONTENTS When using a tool, it can be helpful to know where it originated, so this chapter begins with a brief history of Visual LISP. Next, you learn about the AutoCAD family of programming options blocks and menus; scripts and DIESEL; Visual LISP, ObjectARX, and Visual Basic so that you can understand why some think Visual LISP is the best choice for most AutoCAD customizations. The chapter concludes with some advice on getting started programming in Visual LISP.
Visual LISP is derived from the LISP language, which was defined back in the late 1950s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). LISP was an experiment in reducing the time required to define a problem to the computer. The underlying idea was that future computers would be significantly faster and capable of handling vast amounts of data as well as processor instructions. Therefore, longer processing time and increased resource usage would not matter, but the cost of the people needed to define problems would. (This vision was extraordinary when you consider that it was made during the 1950s, when the few computers that were in existence had little processing power and disk space by today's standards.) The experiment was a modest success. Meanwhile, advances were being made with private industry tools such as FORTRAN from IBM. Because LISP required a lot more computing power than most people had at their disposal and because it was the result of university work with no company standing behind...
