Alan Manuel Gloria: > Going seriously off-topic, but well... Lisp was originally just 'eval (in > fact, the first Lisp implementation was just an eval implementation in a > single page of code by John McCarthy). Very soon after that, macros were > invented. At Lisp spread, scoping was some sort of dynamic rather than > lexical, ...
What's amazing is that the 2 most common Lisps today, Common Lisp and Scheme, use *static* (lexical) scoping. When I learned Lisp (1980s), "everybody" used dynamic scoping, there were lots of smart people who said that static scoping would not be a good idea for Lisps, and I even read arguments as to why dynamic scoping had to be much more efficient. Common Lisp also supports dynamic scoping, but its default is static. Emacs Lisp and some other lisps use only dynamic scoping, but dynamic scoping is no longer "what all Lisps do". --- David A. Wheeler ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter _______________________________________________ Readable-discuss mailing list Readable-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/readable-discuss
