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Re: linux book



On 11 Sep 1999, Alexander L. Belikoff wrote:

:Omer <omer@cs.bgu.ac.il> writes:
:
:> :<Cough, choke> Since when is Perl a "subset of LISP?!" McCarthy would
:> :sure laugh his guts off if he heard that...
:> Since perl supports closures, anonimous functions and first order
:> functions, it is surely closer to LISP than to C. McCarthy laghed when he
:> heard about LISP interpreter, so I suppose he would laugth here ...
:
:All the features above make Perl "somehow similar in features to LISP"
:- and no way closer. It is not based on the LISP syntax and it is a
:LISPer's worst nightmare in the sense of "syntactic sugar to syntax
:rules" ratio... In fact, TCL in that sense is much closer to LISP than
:Perl
The point was that the same knoledge may be useful when writing good LISP
coode and when writing good Perl code. And EOPL is very good for
understading interpreters in general, including Perl. Of course, syntax is
different. And of course, there is always dynamic binding in Perl, and
even when you use my syntax of perl, there is no easy way to achieve
shallow binding of lexical variables. When I said "subset", I intennded to
"Perl supports a subset of programming paradygms native to LISP world,
such as closures, lambda expressions, ability to write referrentially
transparennt code (no side effects) etc", not "Perl, like Scheme, is a
subset of LISP, that differs from the latter in <x, y z>". Moreover, there
are many other languages, similar to LISP in their representation of data,
though quite different in syntax: ML and Haskell come to mind. 

Do not forget that Perl uses a viirtual machine and garbage collection,
BTW. This makes it another bit like LISP.

This microthread was completely out of scope of this list, and I do not
think that we should continue discussion online. If anyone wants to say
something about it, feel free to send me mail, at worst I"ll ignore it
quietly:)


: :-- :Alexander L. Belikoff
:Bloomberg L.P. :abel@vallinor4.com
:
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:

Omer Mussaev tel: 051308214 | finger for public key



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