Perhaps like Xah Lee I find, after many years of Lisp programming, these discussions increasingly frustrating and even, in some sense, amazing. We can speculate all we want about syntax and semantics of programing languages. What counts in the end are really the PRAGMATICS of programming languages. How can I do something with a language that is USEFUL to me? Will the result be good looking, and snappy or some ugly, dated looking, crashing application? For instance, last time I played with Scheme (drScheme) to explore some OpenGL 3D issue I was not impressed at all. One can debate the syntax and semantics of Scheme but in that particular instance all that was important to me was the fact that the Scheme example performed terrible and the threading fell completely apart when running more that a single OpenGL window. Perhaps this was coded poorly but I don't care. Scheme left a pretty bad impression.
alex Prof. Alexander Repenning University of Colorado Computer Science Department Boulder, CO 80309-430 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list