As I learn Scheme I can't help thinking that it is more "fundamental" than other languages....that Scheme is what other languages would look like if we stripped out all the fluff and syntactic sugar.
This idea would be verified if someone could tell me that many other people have *implemented* other languages in Scheme/Lisp. Yet, I'm afraid that most (all?) languages are implemented in C or assembly. Hence, C/assembly/register based machines will always be seen as the most "fundamental" or lower level. I don't know much about the "Lisp machines" of way back. I assume they were just trying to optimize a typical register based CPU for Lisp. See? so even *Lisp machines* are implemented on top of register based machines/assembly. What would really interest me is if someone invented a CPU whose hardware wasn't based on registers and C compilers but somehow built from the ground up to be a Lisp/functional processor. Chris -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
