Re: Example of expression bias?

paul c wrote:

> just trying to read Backus' ACM speech/paper and notice he uses the word
> "objects' to try to get his FP stuff off the ground. i think i've seen
> it used lots of times as a place-holder to make another point. not sure
> why it's a bad sign, unless you mean wrt mainstream rt. sticking my
> neck out here, don't want to get plonked or infamy'ed like c'mode.
>
> p

As Marshall says, Backus' speech & paper came from a more innocent time, when you could get away with saying things like "object" without too much fear :)

Actually, I thought I'd review that after I posted to make sure I wasn't being overly unkind to Common LISP, because it's a good number of years since I looked at it. I had a peek at wikipedia, which begins with "Common LISP is a multi-paradigm programming language," and that brought it all flooding back. (As backdrop, back in about 1996 I had 6 weeks to try prototyping some route planning software; my first thoughts were Prolog, FP or LISP. Prolog I ruled out because of its typelessness, and I really needed some fairly wild types to manage the data I had to hand; I looked into Common LISP but really didn't have time to dig too deep to sort the wheat from the chaff, so ended up settling on Hugs, which was an interpreter for an earlier version of Haskell. I did look at using an SQL database for it, but (a) the queries would have been hideous and (b) because of the data we had and the lack of support for user defined types, the schema would have been even more hideous. I was quite pleased with it in the end, but I've no idea what became of it - I wrote it, trialled it, documented it, handed it over and that was that. Another one for the code pile.) Received on Wed Jun 21 2006 - 04:09:04 CEST