On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Dan Bron <[email protected]> wrote: > Now, I don't know enough about Lisp to tell you if its domain is distinct > enough from J's that the creole would be more expressive than either > language individually. But since I enjoy J (both theory and practice) as > a hobby, I often thought I might also enjoy learning, using, and > discussing other "weird" languages. Lisp and Haskell top of my list > (though I leaned towards Lisp because I enjoy metaprogramming but consider > strong typing and type systems an impediment to productive programming). > But I've never really gotten up the initiative to start.
Traditional lisp implements its lists as pairs: The first element of the list and a reference to the rest of the list. This is very different from how J implements lists, so I would expect that translating data from one environment to the other would involve some non-trivial overhead. Also, some lisp data structures could not be translated directly to J arrays, for example consider a circular list which has itself for the "rest of the list" part. But a J representation which preserves this "feature" would be inefficient and clumsy for most computational tasks. So... I think you would need to focus on a specific application domain for an implementation of this sort, to help you discard some of the complexities which would plague a "do what I say" design. FYI, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
