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One observation to be made is that Common Lisp has 25 special forms (http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec/Body/sec_3-1-2-1-2-1.html#clsp
by sedachv 17y ago
One observation to be made is that Common Lisp has 25 special forms (http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec/Body/sec_3-1-2-1-2-1.html#clspecialops http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec...). That's quite a lot. But none of them are redundant or superfluous.
- barrkel 17y agoI am very certain that almost all of them could be removed without reducing the theoretical power of Common Lisp. At worst, successive rewrites of the program could reduce it to using a different set of simpler forms.
- foldr 17y agoWell yeah, you don't need all those special forms to keep the language Turing complete, but you do need them to provide a lot of what people regard as the "powerful" features of common lisp. I wouldn't care to program without flet, for example, but obviously one could remove flet without any loss of power in a certain sense.
- barrkel 17y agoNo, I mean that you could create a Lisp which had fewer forms, but that provided these special forms - that you would program using - except that they would no longer be special, but rather synthesized out of baser forms.
- lispm 17y agoYou don't need to guess. Here is the list of special operators: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Body/03_ababa.htm#clspecialops http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Body/03_aba... Just tell us which ones you would replace.