David A. Wheeler scripsit: > What's amazing is that the 2 most common Lisps today, Common Lisp and > Scheme, use *static* (lexical) scoping.
It shows how influential the Great Quux has been in language design; after all, he was in substantial part responsible for both Scheme and CL (to say nothing of Java). > 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. If memory is very very scarce, as it was in the 1970s, then dynamic scope is acceptably performant in space and time, which almost compensates for its utter lack of transparency. Even RMS only says nowadays that dynamic scope is a Good Thing to have, not that it's the best Default Thing. IMHO first-class parameters (typically, but not always, held in global variables) are far superior to dynamically scoped variables. -- John Cowan co...@ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand. --Gerald Holton ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
