Re: A Dylan implemented on Common Lisp

[eliot@cs.umass.edu (CHRISTOPHER ELIOT)]

In article <D5345w.3xC@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>In article <3jgef0$fnt@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu> sef@CS.CMU.EDU (Scott Fahlman) writes:
[...]
>>Having a Dylan-in-CL for some
>>transitional period is not a good enough reason to preserve all the
>>accumulated small irritations that have built up in Lisp over the
>>decades.
>
>Contrary to the impression created by Scott's anti-Lisp propaganda,
>Common Lisp eliminated most of the small irritations that had built
>up over the years.  (E.g. interpreters using different scope rules
>than compilers)  Some of the remaining "small irritations" (e.g.
>nil being false) are not universally considered irritations.
>In any case, a Dylan-in-CL can handle nil vs #f (Scott's example),
>as Schemes-in-CL have shown.

In early versions of NIL there were distinct symbols for NIL and
false. This was eventually found to be more of an irritation
than combining them.  It may not satisfy a mathematical purist,
but it works well in practice.

>Note that Scott Fahlman was one of the designers of Common Lisp
>and had plenty of opportunities to eliminate any irritations that
>irritated him.
>
>-- jd

And means that his criticism of Common Lisp can't be
dismissed as easily the complaints made by people who have only
used Basic or Cobol.

-Chris Eliot