This is a "pre-comment" to commencement of SICP on Monday..:)
First of all, I think I'm going to like reading this book. The authors
seem like they know their stuff.
I wanted to make a comment about this notion, reiterated in SICP,
that Lisp blurs the line
between functions and data as if that is some profound feature/observation.
(1) Many languages have an eval function that lets you effectively have
"macros" just like Lisp....e.g. Python, Ruby and Javascript IIRC.
(2) Functions and data are not essentially the same thing any more than
nouns and verbs are essentially that same thing. They can only
be *represented* by the same language/alphabet.
Imagine I told you I made the "deep" observation that nouns and verbs
could both be described in the same language/alphabet known as "English".
Ooooh ahhh! Would that impress you?
(3) This notion can be traced back to "stored program concept" credited to
ENIAC authors. They realized data and instructions could be stored
in the same hardware as if they were the same thing. But!!! an instruction
is only *represented* by an integer. It is *not* the integer itself
anymore than a picture of George Washington is the same thing as George
Washington.
Chris
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