Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!usc!apple!cambridge.apple.com!alms From: alms@cambridge.apple.com (Andrew L. M. Shalit) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave? Message-ID: Date: 17 Jan 91 19:53:21 GMT References: <127724@linus.mitre.org> <5569@turquoise.UUCP> <3954@skye.ed.ac.uk> Sender: news@cambridge.apple.com Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cambridge, MA Lines: 21 In-reply-to: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk's message of 16 Jan 91 19:01:04 GMT In article <3954@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes: There isn't any reason, other than historical, why Common Lisp couldn't be presented, and even implemented, in a more C-like way, as a language plus libraries of procedures and data types. Offhand, I disagree with this. It's true, Common Lisp has many features. But these features are often used to implement other features. In other words, a CL implementation has a very tangled call tree. It's hard to find portions of the language which could be removed. If you put APPEND, ASSOC, MEMBER, REVERSE, and MAPCAR into a separate module (as EuLisp does, I believe) chances are that every implementation is going to have them in the kernel anyway. Hash-tables are used to implement packages. Format is used for error messages and other system io. Sequence functions are used all over the place, etc. The only real candidate for separability I can think of is non-integer numerics. -andrew --