On July 27, 2006 12:44 PM Gaby wrote: > ... Basically, it boils down to manipulating things > symbolically and Lisp is very good at that.
I do not see that reflection has anything specifically to do with symbolic manipulation. > Other languages can be used, but they are going to > mimic Lisp. Well, yeeaasss ... to the extent that they support first order types. I admit that it is easy to to this kind of thing in Lisp in a less structured way - at least it used to be in versions of lisp before types in lisp became popular. I don't know enough about types in modern lisp to know how this would work now in compiled lisp programs. > > Unless, you have a way to implement this directly in > the compiler. See Template Haskell (in GHC sources) for > the kind of thing that is done. > It is very very easy for the compiler to generate self- identifying type constants either all the time or as a compile-time option. This can even been done in a simple pre-compilation step if necessary. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
