3 ms·

Is going the other way possible? That is, could erlang's strengths be expressed through macros in lisp?

• PieSquared 18y ago
  Not without a pretty weird lisp VM or something. Or maybe separating different threads into processes and doing the communication hidden inside the macro? Hum, I dunno. Might be worth looking into, but it seems either very hard or impossible... granted, I don't have as much experience with macros as other people on this site might have, so maybe someone else will correct me in my assessment.
  • utx00 18y ago
    thanks.
  • celoyd 18y ago
    Actually, given call/cc (http://www.madore.org/~david/computers/callcc.html http://www.madore.org/~david/computers/callcc.html), it's not a big deal. I think Termite (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/841 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/841) is implemented in Gambit with call/cc.
    • celoyd 18y ago
      I'm a fool. If I'd bothered to look it up first, I would have remembered that the actor model was integral to the invention of Scheme. See Sussman & Steele, Scheme: An Interpreter for Extended Lambda Calculus (AI Memo 349), 1975 (the first link at http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html). From the acknowledgements: This work developed out of an initial attempt to understand the actorness of actors. Steele thought he understood it, but couldn't explain it; Sussman suggested the experimental approach of actually building an "ACTORS interpreter". This interpreter attempted to intermix the use of actors and LISP lambda expressions in a clean manner. When it was completed we discovered that the "actors" and the lambda expressions were identical in implementation.