mikel wrote:
> Where else do you see unwind-protect?
>
> I ran into this problem a lot of times working on large projects
using
> Lisp--the problem of explaining why Lisp was a good choice for
> implementing what I was doing. We would be asked what it gave us, and
> would give an answer, and the questioners would say "but I could do
that
> with <insert language here>."
[snip...]
> I think a really interested person could learn a lot of what makes
Lisp
> special just by looking at how many and what kinds of things are
> idiomatic in Lisp projects that aren't done much in other languages,
and
> what kinds of things are idiomatic in other languages but that no one
> seems to bother much with in Lisp.
I would like to add Pascal Bourguignon's analysis where he mentioned
six things like this:
"You can get 90% of lisp macros with C macros."
"You can get 90% of lisp GC with Java GC."
...
90% to the 6th power is about 53%. So even if one single language had
all of these 90%'s, it would still offer half of what you'd want from a
language. At best. Because language features multiply off each other
and intertwingle.
Closures + replacing function definitions gets you things like MEMOIZE.
Just a thought that I'd like to write down before I forget. Thanks to
those supplying C counterexamples, such things really inform
discussions.
MfG,
Tayssir
--
Bruce Lee's teachings fit in nontrivially with programming!
http://www.dreamsongs.com/cgi-bin/ExtravagariaWiki/index.cgi?NontraditionalLiterature