Re: [Gnu-arch-users] OT: Lisp

[Andrew Suffield]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 05:38:16PM -0800, Joshua Haberman wrote:
> - it is functional in nature.  however, doing most anything
> non-mathematical requires procedural programming to some degree.

This is not actually true in general. However, you don't do general
functional programming in lisp because it's too hard. There are
languages which overcome this for general purpose, purely functional
programming (Haskell is the classic). It's phenomenally hard to grasp
though, if you're used to procedural programming and have no
background in mathematics.

> It also makes me think of Lisp as the
> anti-Perl: where Lisp has one syntax that all language features are
> mapped onto, Perl has a special syntax for everything (sometimes even
> two or three syntaxes for the same feature, as with quoting!)

Perl's syntax is actually infinitely mutable in all cases. Some cases
are a bit inefficient, but you can pretty much always get "close
enough".

-- 
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