Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!news!gateley
From: gateley@rice.edu (John Gateley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Message-ID: 
Date: 17 Jan 91 22:33:02 GMT
References: <127724@linus.mitre.org> <5569@turquoise.UUCP> <3954@skye.ed.ac.uk>
	
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In-Reply-To: alms@cambridge.apple.com's message of 17 Jan 91 19:53:21 GMT

In article  alms@cambridge.apple.com (Andrew L. M. Shalit) writes:
   In article <3954@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
      There isn't any reason, other than historical, why
      Common Lisp couldn't be presented, and even implemented, in a more
      C-like way, as a language plus libraries of procedures and data types.
   Offhand, I disagree with this.
   It's true, Common Lisp has many features.  But these features are
   often used to implement other features.  In other words, a CL
   implementation has a very tangled call tree.

By choosing an appropriate set of primitives, you can get a small core
library with the property that the majority of functions in the CL
library will call only members of the core library (or the core
library plus a small set of others). This gives you the needed
untanglement.

John
gateley@rice.edu

--
"...Yes, I've got some questions that are guaranteed to shake you up. How
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