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Date:      Thu, 1 Feb 2001 08:24:36 +0000
From:      Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at>
To:        Roelof Osinga <roelof@nisser.com>
Cc:        Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>, "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: OT: non-Unix history (Was: FreeBSD vs linux)
Message-ID:  <20010201082436.F70673@hand.dotat.at>
In-Reply-To: <3A78D708.5F5873C8@nisser.com>
References:  <14957.31196.939559.889627@guru.mired.org> <3A6F43F7.E43C6CA0@nisser.com> <14959.23870.728403.859934@guru.mired.org> <3A78BA39.8A14F8F@nisser.com> <14968.49854.189652.128754@guru.mired.org> <3A78D708.5F5873C8@nisser.com>

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Roelof Osinga <roelof@nisser.com> wrote:
>Mike Meyer wrote:
>>
>> I'm not sure what you think they meant by CL, but they actually meant
>> Common Lisp. Both CL and Scheme came from the LISP community, and had
>> a LISP-like syntax on an Algol-like structure.
>
>Now Algol was about block structures, something traditional. John 
>McCarthy's LISP OTOH was about Lambda calculus. Though not Typed
>Lambda Calculus whereas Algol was in fact typed. In as far as typing
>went in those days. Mind you, polymorphism and overloading were
>concepts introduced in the early '60s.
>
>CL is LISP extended and standardized as far as can be. Not KISS.
>Scheme, in contrast, just took one aspect of LISP - can't remember
>which, most likely closures - and extended just that. That is KISS.

The point about Common Lisp and Scheme being Algol-like is that they
have lexically scoped local variables, whereas traditional LISP (and
Emacs Lisp) have dynamically scoped variables.

Scheme was a simplification of Lisp based on more modern computer
science, in terms of theory, specification, and implementation. The
implementation idea was continuation-passing -- see Guy L Steele's
"LAMBDA: The Ultimate foo" papers.

http://www.ai.mit.edu/publications/bibliography/BIB-online.html

Tony.
-- 
f.a.n.finch    fanf@covalent.net    dot@dotat.at
"If I didn't see it with my own eyes I would never have believed it!"


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