On Jan 25, 2008 12:02 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I was talking to some Lispers yesterday and they said > Scheme does NOT have a "SYMBOL" type. Rather, in Scheme > a symbol is "just a string" which is a good thing. He said Common Lisp DOES > have a symbol type only for "historical reasons". > > I'm not happy knowing Common Lisp is more complicated than absolutely > necessary > "for historical reasons". > > Lisp needs a young "Torvalds" type leader to BREAK BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY and > create the BEST LISP POSSIBLE without giving one thought to past kruft. > > Perhaps Scheme is a good start for this.
Paul Graham is trying to be this person: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham#Arc_Programming_Language And yes, the Scheme guys were creating a better LISP, but not a better Common LISP which they worked on *later*: "Scheme predates CL, and comes not only from the same Lisp tradition but from some of the same engineers—Guy L. Steele, with whom Gerald Jay Sussman designed Scheme, chaired the standards committee for Common Lisp." -- the "Comparison with other Lisps" of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_lisp But um, wouldn't comparing strings be awfully slow? In Objective-C symbols are strings that have been put through a function which adds them or pulls them from a pool of unique strings. After that they can be done as pointer comparisons with no dereferencing which is screaming fast vs. comparing string contents. .NET has a similar concept called "interned strings". -Chuck -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
