[taos-glug] Re: my progress report
- From: Jonathan Bartlett <johnnyb@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: taos-glug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 11:43:07 -0700 (PDT)
> I'm still withholding judgment about Scheme in general and in particular
> about Gnu's recommended Guile/C combination. The foreword characterizes
> Pascal as good for building pyramids and Lisp as good for building
> organisms. I don't think I grasp the latter point yet.
The reason that Scheme is recommended by GNU for programming, is that
Scheme itself is so programmable, especially when you use macros. This
comes from the fact that Scheme doesn't really have a syntax. It's a
bare parse tree. With a combination of functions and macros, Scheme can
be transformed so it can read and run the parse tree of any language.
The things that people love about scheme:
* it's lack of syntax (code == data - this allows you to write programs
that build and modify programs)
* closures
* continuations
* macros
* support for lazy evaluation
* first-class functions
* first-class symbols
* strictly-typed but loosely bound
Jon
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