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On Lisp: the 6 keystones of Lisp
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| GP lisper 2005-04-27, 3:59 pm |
| Trying to get a handle on CLOS, I grabbed my Kinkos copy of "On Lisp"
and jumped far ahead to the CLOS chapter. In section 25.1, there is a
footnote (which in the .pdf version is for page 349) which reads:
"Efforts to sum up Lisp in a single phrase are probably doomed to
failure, because the power of Lisp arises from the combination of at
least five or six features."
OK, I can think of
1 extensibility
2 garbage collection
3 functions as a type
4 ... oh-oh out of newbie guesses
--
Everyman has three hearts;
one to show the world, one to show friends, and one only he knows.
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| André Thieme 2005-04-27, 3:59 pm |
| GP lisper schrieb:
> Trying to get a handle on CLOS, I grabbed my Kinkos copy of "On Lisp"
> and jumped far ahead to the CLOS chapter. In section 25.1, there is a
> footnote (which in the .pdf version is for page 349) which reads:
>
> "Efforts to sum up Lisp in a single phrase are probably doomed to
> failure, because the power of Lisp arises from the combination of at
> least five or six features."
>
> OK, I can think of
>
> 1 extensibility
>
> 2 garbage collection
>
> 3 functions as a type
I would add: equality between code and data.
Another good thing is that you always have the full language available.
I could write a program that creates some data at runtime which is then
seen as code and gets compiled while the program is running.
André
--
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| Edi Weitz 2005-04-27, 3:59 pm |
| On Wed, 27 Apr 2005 04:33:04 -0700, GP lisper <spambait@CloudDancer.com> wrote:
> Trying to get a handle on CLOS, I grabbed my Kinkos copy of "On
> Lisp" and jumped far ahead to the CLOS chapter. In section 25.1,
> there is a footnote (which in the .pdf version is for page 349)
> which reads:
>
> "Efforts to sum up Lisp in a single phrase are probably doomed to
> failure, because the power of Lisp arises from the combination of at
> least five or six features."
>
> OK, I can think of
>
> 1 extensibility
>
> 2 garbage collection
>
> 3 functions as a type
>
> 4 ... oh-oh out of newbie guesses
Graham himself has in the meantime made that nine instead of six:
<http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html>
Cheers,
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq "spamtrap@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
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| Tayssir John Gabbour 2005-04-27, 3:59 pm |
| GP lisper wrote:
> Trying to get a handle on CLOS, I grabbed my Kinkos copy of "On Lisp"
> and jumped far ahead to the CLOS chapter. In section 25.1, there
> is a footnote (which in the .pdf version is for page 349) which
> reads:
>
> "Efforts to sum up Lisp in a single phrase are probably doomed to
> failure, because the power of Lisp arises from the combination of
> at least five or six features."
>
> OK, I can think of
>
> 1 extensibility
>
> 2 garbage collection
>
> 3 functions as a type
>
> 4 ... oh-oh out of newbie guesses
More ideas...
- different scopes/extents
- you can interact with lisp at different times (read/compile/etc)
- compiler macros
- optional type declarations
- well-thought out primitive types like featureful arrays
- system utilities like apropos
I vaguely recall Ant=F3nio Menezes Leit=E3o mentioned unusual uses for
compiler macros.
http://lisp.tech.coop/Paper#leitao
Maybe here?
http://www.gia.ist.utl.pt/~aml/Link...le-efficient.ps
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