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Sussman says Lisp can't do it, need to use C; Greenspun proposes Common Lisp; Sussman says that if that's true (if CL can do it but Scheme can't), then Scheme h
by rntz 15y ago
Sussman says Lisp can't do it, need to use C; Greenspun proposes Common Lisp; Sussman says that if that's true (if CL can do it but Scheme can't), then Scheme has been a waste of time (an odd conclusion IMO); Greenspun proves that CL can do it; Bill Rozas points out that the problem is in Scheme's inefficient reader implementation, not an inherent problem with Scheme itself.
- hapless 15y agoLet's see if I have this right. I could be wrong about the details here: Before it was called "Scheme," Sussman was writing papers about a lisp subset that could be optimized. Some folks tried to write an optimizing compiler, known as "T." http://mumble.net/~jar/tproject/ http://mumble.net/~jar/tproject/ Common Lisp was a superset of a bunch of vendor Lisp systems, even more monstrously complex than any individual vendor Lisp. So if I follow the author: If a CL implementation was indeed faster and better-optimized than the simpler Scheme dialect, then what was the purpose of Scheme?
- groovy2shoes 15y agoThe initial purpose of Scheme was to implement Hewitt's Actor model in Lisp. Steele and Sussman realized that "actors" were the same as lexical closures [1]. The Lambda Papers [2] describe the early implementation details of Scheme, and it was these papers that influenced the development of T [3]. [1] "The History of Scheme" http://labs.oracle.com/projects/plrg/JAOO-SchemeHistory-2006public.pdf http://labs.oracle.com/projects/plrg/JAOO-SchemeHistory-2006... [2] "The Lambda Papers" http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html [3] "History of T" http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html