I hope I can be forgiven for jumping onto a soap-box a bit late, but I'd
like to propose a broader view of the "Lisp vs. other languages" issue
than has arisen so far from the feature-level comparison of Lisp and
Haskell. In particular, I'd like to look at the issue from the
perspective of progra
> 1) LISP is usually interpreted though most LISP systems allow
> compilation too.
This is not really a language issue, more a question of implementation
tradition. Most Lisp implementations have interpreters, though some
always compile.
However, a fair number of programmers always, or almost
Thanks Sandra for the corrections --- glad I broadcast my reply rather
than mailing directly.
I knew compilation was the more common route --- just didn't emphsise it
enough. The point I totally failed to make was that having an interpreter
can be pretty nice. (The work I'm doing at the momen
Most Lisp dialects don't have any sort of destructuring for abstract data
types, but I question whether destructuring is really all that useful
anyway. If you have a type with 20 or 30 components -- which is not all
that unusual, in my experience -- it's much easier to grab the ones
A few more differences between LISP and Haskell:
1) LISP is usually interpreted though most LISP systems allow compilation too.
At the moment, Haskell is a compiled language (though Gofer comes pretty
close to being a Haskell interpreter).
(This is probably the reason for the "Haskell
