Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 10:13:27 01/21/06
Go up one level in this thread
On January 21, 2006 at 12:57:47, James Swafford wrote: >On January 21, 2006 at 12:45:04, Tord Romstad wrote: > >>This is a very common misconception: Unlike Haskell, Lisp is not a >>functional language, but a multi-paradigm language. It supports >>functional programming, but also imperative programming, >>object-oriented programming and declarative programming, >>and is not heavily biased towards either of them. In fact, many >>Lisp programmers consider using functional programming >>where more straightforward approaches are possible to be very >>poor style. > >This I didn't know! I did know that Lisp was not purely functional >(Haskell is), but I didn't know it was multi-paradigm. The misconception probably has historical roots. Lisp started out as a functional language (the first functional language, I think) some time at the end of the 1950s. It has (of course) evolved a lot since then, and modern Common Lisp has little more than the syntax and the basic philosophy in common with the original Lisp. Besides Common Lisp, there is also another relatively recent Lisp dialect called Scheme which is popular in research and education. While Scheme is also not a purely functional language, it is a lot closer to the functional camp than Common Lisp. >Many programmers from the functional camp don't like Standard-ML >because it has allowed imperative aspects to "pollute" the language. >I wonder how much more they dislike Lisp. :) Far more than SML, I am sure. :-) And of course, the Smalltalk camp also hates us because the language doesn't force us to use OO for everything. Tord
This page took 0.01 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.