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From: lgm@cbnewsc.att.com (lawrence.g.mayka)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: Objective-C review
Message-ID: <1990Jun27.003122.23603@cbnewsc.att.com>
Date: 27 Jun 90 00:31:22 GMT
References: <1690@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl> <5239@stpstn.UUCP> <55443@microsoft.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 36

In article <55443@microsoft.UUCP> jimad@microsoft.UUCP (Jim ADCOCK) writes:
>low level programming tasks.  Ideally, one would have a language that would
>seamlessly handle the full range of programming tasks -- one would never have
>to break into assembler.  No standard language quite handles that.  Languages
>that cannot do a good job of programming in the small require that the 
>low level "chip" libraries be written in a different language, and provided
>as part of a compiler's implementation.  In practice, all compilers have a

It depends what you mean by a "different" language.  Lisp on a
Symbolics workstation can indeed "seamlessly handle the full range
of programming tasks," from DEFINE-PROGRAM-FRAMEWORK in the Dynamic
Windows package all the way down to %POINTER-DIFFERENCE in the
System package.  Certainly not all of this is defined in standard
Common Lisp, of course:  The highest-level constructs have not yet
been standardized throughout the industry; the lowest-level
constructs violate trusted Common Lisp abstractions and their very
standardization might encourage their use beyond what is absolutely
necessary.  Nevertheless, all constructs great and small follow the
usual syntactic patterns of the Lisp language - functions, macros,
and special forms - and "are" Lisp to the same extent that the
extra library functions a particular C implementation might include
"are" C.

In another sense, of course, your statement is somewhat naive, in
that no one uses a single language for all aspects of computation,
all the way down to microcoding, chip cell placement, gate
connection, etc.  (Though the Symbolics microprocessor designers
may have come close if their microcoding language and chip cell
placement language were Lisp-like!)


	Lawrence G. Mayka
	AT&T Bell Laboratories
	lgm@iexist.att.com

Standard disclaimer.