adams@aar.alcatel-alsthom.fr (Drew Adams) (02/18/91)
In article <4010@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes: >On the other hand, I have heard a number of claims about why CL >has strayed from the One True Path of Lisp. Some people think >that it was a big mistake to have both dynamic and lexical scoping >(forgetting, perhaps, that many Lisps have had both, although >the lexical scoping took a more limited form). One person said >that CL was far from the center of Lisp because it had taken on >too much from procedural languages. > >So there's quite a range of things someone making such a claim >might have in mind. Agreed. One person objects to iterative, procedural constructs, prefering stream processing and functional mappings; another is oppositely inclined. "Les gouts et les couleurs, ca ne se discute pas!" (One person's meat is another's poison.) Perhaps partly because CL has something for everyone, it has something for everyone to knock. Is such all-inclusiveness itself something negative? ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This is a reasonable subject for debate in general, and also in the narrower context of CL and its design goals. In the latter case, I don't think CL's designers did so badly, *given their goals*. Among others, a principal goal was to come up with something `largely compatible' with the major existing dialects of the time. This, in itself, would tend to lead more to a stew than a clear broth. -- Drew ADAMS: adams@aar.alcatel-alsthom.fr Tel. +33 (1) 64.49.11.54 ALCATEL ALSTHOM Recherche, Route de Nozay, 91460 MARCOUSSIS, FRANCE