Re: APL and LISP

[SHRAGE at WHARTON (Jeffrey Shrager)]

1- Agreed that LISP and APL have it all over most other languages in
   COMMON practice (thus excluding a lot of things like CLUE, ALICE, etc)
2- I'm actually sorry that I mentioned APL to start with.  Although a
   comparison of APL and LISP might be interesting in its own right, this
   is not the point of our flaming.  Rather, we are arguing a subject that
   I might call, in the recent style of SIGPLAN: "Uncontrolled extensibilty
   considered harmful."

I think that we actiually all agree to a very large extent about APL vs LISP
and InterLISP vs MacLISP vs....  It is the philosophy of system building that
is being argued.  The simplistic solution is to provide infinite flexibility
and have the user (programmer) do with it as he sees fit.  If he wants to
be careful he(she) will.  Of course, there is always the potential, no matter
how carefully the environment is designed in this respect, to make a mess if
you try.  I started out arguing that LISP has lost (perhaps, was never 
intended to have) transportability or commonality of anykind (above the basic
list datastructure) due to its laxness in this area.  If this is the way the
designers want it then fine but I think that that is a mistake.  What I 
had wanted to discuss was not incorporation of APL into LISP (although there
is, again, some interest there) but corrections to the LISP environment as
defined by MacLISP that would help in this problem.  Some LISP implementations,
CADR for one, have already done a lot of this.  Fine!