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Interesting, never heard of TXR before. Too close for comfort on first blush though, changing arbitrary details in existing programming languages divides. Even
by codr4life 10y ago
Interesting, never heard of TXR before. Too close for comfort on first blush though, changing arbitrary details in existing programming languages divides. Even having both Scheme and Common Lisp so close together takes a lot of energy that could be used more constructively. Thanks for the links.
- kazinator 10y agoOh well; I'm not interested in making a conforming implementation of ANSI Lisp. Some things are worth throwing out. For instance setq and setf are "onions in the varnish". Lisp has a set function which is rarely used. Because it exists, we cannot give the general assignment operator the name it wants: set. The q in setq refers to its historic relationship with set: "like set but with the var implicitly quoted". This relationship broke decades ago when Lisp went lexical: (setq x y) is (set 'x y) only when x is a dynamic var. And of course setq is redundant since every setq can be replaced with setf, and setf even replaces set since symbol-value is an accessor. Can I be blamed for not wanting to reproduce this baggage and just having one set macro? It may seem like a small thing, but most programmers are used to assignment just being =. The name "set" is still reasonably acceptable. We see it in vi, some shells, and such. "set" with a gratuitous letter added for fifty-year-old reasons: not so much.
- codr4life 10y agoMe neither, as much as I love that standard and the people involved in making it happen :) Just getting the implementation details right is at least a life time effort. And like you say, a lot could be improved and some is still missing. But as a solid, mature foundation; it beats the mine field that is exploratory language design.