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Technically the language is a Term Rewriting System[1]. You can use it as a TRS by directly manipulating transformation rules, in a functional way, in an impera
by scrumper 13y ago
Technically the language is a Term Rewriting System[1]. You can use it as a TRS by directly manipulating transformation rules, in a functional way, in an imperative way, and of course as pure symbolic mathematics.
It does naturally suit functional thinking, so that becomes the default 'best' way of engaging with it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewriting#Term_rewriting_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewriting#Term_rewriting_system...
- Jtsummers 13y agoThanks. I think I knew this years ago while spending my off-work hours delving deeper into programming language history and theory, but most of that info is now lost from disuse. Like I said to your sibling post, I see the semantic comparisons, I just don't get calling it a "lisp variant", unless we're going to call every language with somewhat similar or derivative semantics but wildly different syntactical structures and additional semantic constructs lisp variants as well. With that, distinction between languages (primarily for conversation and discussions) becomes virtually non-existent as we could probably come up with a half dozen categories that all languages fall under.