Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!rice!titan.rice.edu!preston From: preston@titan.rice.edu (Preston Briggs) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: The Universal Language (Was Re: Efficient Fortran) Message-ID: <1990Aug7.012726.2993@rice.edu> Date: 7 Aug 90 01:27:26 GMT References: <23950@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> Sender: news@rice.edu (News) Organization: Rice University, Houston Lines: 25 In article mwm@raven.pa.dec.com (Mike (Real Amigas have keyboard garages) Meyer) writes: >Such a language is doomed to failure. The problem can be expressed as: >Do you have hooks for dealing with sigournism, a field of study whose >subject matter will be discovered in 2012, ... Lisp, of course, has such capabilities; has had for years. You just wrap parentheses around it and claim that it's been there all along! ( :-) ) I'm not entirely joking. New data types (simple and structured) are easy to add. New functions are easy. New control structures are easy. The framework stretches a long way. I guess I'm not sure what the question is here. You guys are talking of a "universal" language... Do you have a problem we can't program around in Lisp (or C or whatever)? (Of course, some problems can't be solved, regardless of the language. Other problems are perhaps more conveniently expressed in one language or another (Lisp of course making all programs equally inconvenient).) -- Preston Briggs looking for the great leap forward preston@titan.rice.edu