cbl@mspiggy (CB Leyerle) (08/30/83)
I believe the language EL1 and the programming environment ECL are largely the design of Thomas "Mumblefratz" Cheatham at Harvard, and funded by the Air Force. "EL1" reputedly stands for "Extensible Language 1"--extensible inasmuch as one can extend (or redefine) the syntax of the language. Apart from the generic, such as introducing new data types, one can also do a variety of extremely brain-damage things like define the symbol '+' to mean minus, the symbol '8' to be a function returning an array, etc. Debugging was a nightmare as I recall. I imagine one could do these same contortions in C with #define, but that would lack the anarchy of doing them during interpretation of the program, where they can be redefined. No I am not a fan. Entomophobically yours, Flyerly.