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The very first versions of Lisp were less functional than Common Lisp: imperative, mutable data, mostly only dynamic scoping for variables, no lexical scope, fi
by lispm 5y ago
The very first versions of Lisp were less functional than Common Lisp: imperative, mutable data, mostly only dynamic scoping for variables, no lexical scope, first class data type of functions unclear, ...
Common Lisp at least has lexical scope and first class functions.
- bradrn 5y ago> The very first versions of Lisp were less functional than Common Lisp: imperative, mutable data, mostly only dynamic scoping for variables, no lexical scope, first class data type of functions unclear, ... Hmm, perhaps I’m misremembering — I know very little about the history of Lisp. I was thinking specifically about the very beginning of the language, where it could be used to define ‘eval’ and nothing much else.
- lispm 5y agoThis is the manual of Lisp I, the first actual implementation of Lisp, from 1960: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/rle_lisp/LISP_I_Programmers_Manual_Mar60.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/rle_lisp/LISP_I_Programmers_Man...
- hajile 5y agoCommon Lisp has lexical AND dynamic scoping. This is very nice with constants. A function can make a hard dependency on standard out for example. If I change that value locally then call the function, it will operate as expected while everything else using that variable name will continue using their own expected values too. Lexical scoping would instead require passing that value in every time it is used.