Re: (Lisp is Crisp!)^4

[David West <umich!dwt@UMIX.CC.UMICH.EDU>]

>Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept. Ann Arbor

In article <1409@mind.UUCP> apoorva@mind.UUCP (Apoorva Muralidhara) writes:
>
>Any fellow applicativists out there?
>			--Apoorva/Applicativist Revolutionary Underground
>
>[Death to the side effects!]

Applicativity has its advantages, but it needs
1) a more humanly-comprehensible syntax than LISP; Miranda (TM) is excellent
   in this respect, but the (TM) will probably doom it, as apparently was the
   case with COMIT (TM).
2) Some syntactic means for preventing argumentsfrom getting unreadably
   numerous just to pass something down to where it's finally used. 
3) a public domain portable optimizing implementation (though all three of 
   these attributes together is perhaps too much to hope for.)  The thing
   that made Pascal fly was the availability of the Zurich P-compiler
   initially, then Turbo.  What the world needs now is GNU Miranda or (ok,
   I'll be more reasonable)  GNU ML.  (Richard is probably too busy, though...)
   Turbo ML?
   
   -David West     dwt@zippy.eecs.umich.edu
   [Nested parentheses - just say  no]