Daniel Wang (danwang@dynamic.CS.Princeton.EDU) wrote about Lisp:
> But it doesn't provide any special builtin pre-packaged support for
> manipulating a specific set of abstractions. (Special syntax for example)
Huh? Common Lisp provides syntax for characters, strings, integers, ratios,
several floating point types, complex numbers composed from these numeric
types, pairs/lists, structures, arrays, symbols, mostly-constant patterns
(i.e. the backquote mechanism), conditional input, evaluated sub-expressions,
embedded references to other parts of the input to form cyclic data, and
some more. In fact, I don't know any other programming language (and I know
quite a few) where such a variety of data structures can be directly written,
instread of composing them from several initialization statements. Then, as
you said, all this is easily extendable with the full expressiveness of the
language.
> This is why Lisp doesn't have a type system,
Common Lisp does have an expressive type system (and good implementations
use this plus considerable type inference both for optimization and for type
checking). What it doesn't have is _enforced_ statically decidable typing.
-- Marc Wachowitz <mw@ipx2.rz.uni-mannheim.de>
|