Re: [Haskell] Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell versus Lisp

David F. Place wrote:

I don't deny that all of the things you mentioned are wonderful indeed. I just wonder if they really could only be done in lisp or even most conveniently.

Obviously, if you can do it in Lisp, you can do it in any Turing-complete language; in the worst case, you just write a Lisp interpreter. As for convenience: syntax matters. The equivalence of code and data in Lisp lets you write your own syntactic sugar. You're still bound by the lexical (token-level) grammar, although reader macros mean that isn't much of a restriction. -- Glynn Clements