Reminds me io language. On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 03:41:06PM -0400, John Zabroski wrote: > John Shutt has a new blog, sharing his thoughts on programming language > design. He has written a blog post titled "Primacy of Syntax". > [1]http://fexpr.blogspot.com/2011/06/primacy-of-syntax.html > > Shutt's work on fexprs came to my attention mostly due to a curious > statement by Alan Kay in his Early History of Smalltalk paper: > > "I could hardly believe how beautiful and wonderful the idea of LISP was. > I say it this way because LISP had not only been around enough to get some > honest barnacles, but worse, there were deep flaws in its logical > foundations. By this, I mean that the pure language was supposed to be > based on functions, but its most important components -- such as lambda > expressions, quotes, and conds -- were not functions at all, and instead > were called special forms. Landin and others had been able to get quotes > and cons in terms of lambda by tricks that were variously clever and > useful, but the flaw remained in the jewel. In the practical language > things were better. There were not just EXPRs (which evaluated their > arguments), but FEXPRs (which did not). My next questions was, why on > Earth call it a functional language? Why not just base everything on > FEXPRs and force evaluation on the receiving side when needed? > > I could never get a good answer, but the question was very helpful when it > came time to invent Smalltalk, because this started a line of thought that > said 'take the hardest and most profound thing you need to do, make it > great, an then build every easier thing out of it.'" > > Alan Kay, > The Early History of Smalltalk., > in: Bergin, Jr., T.J., and R.G. Gibson. > History of Programming Languages - II, > ACM Press, New York NY, and > Addison-Wesley Publ. Co., Reading MA 1996, > pp. 511-578 > Since then, I have been really interested in what Shutt has to say about > language design. Shutt has in essence given Alan his "good answer", > although whether Alan likes Shutt's Ph.D. thesis is unknown to me. It > does seem like there is a lot of overlap with John's ideas and VPRI's > ideas, but each use different terminology. For example, VPRI uses "chains > of meaning", whereas John talks about the output of a language being > another language rather than a function returning a value that explains > the meaning of a language. > > Cheers, > Z-Bo > > References > > Visible links > 1. http://fexpr.blogspot.com/2011/06/primacy-of-syntax.html
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