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From: barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: In defense of call/cc (and a plug for T)
Message-ID: <1991Feb15.082301.2154@Think.COM>
Date: 15 Feb 91 08:23:01 GMT
References: <1991Feb12.233157.20820@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov> <1991Feb13.055938.22853@Think.COM> <1991Feb14.223202.11475@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov>
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In article <1991Feb14.223202.11475@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov> gat@forsight.jpl.nasa.gov (Erann Gat) writes:
>What I do not understand is why you can't do both: first start with a set
>of primitives.  Define the hell out of them so everyone agrees what they do.

The Common Lisp designers didn't have the luxury of starting from first
principles.  Read the history chapter of CLtL.  The goal of Common Lisp was
to unify many of the Lisp dialects that were proliferating by the early
80's.  They needed to produce something relatively quickly, or users would
get too dependent on their incompatible dialects.  A reasonable amount of
compatibility with existing dialects, or at least the ability to coexist
with them and/or automatically translate from them to CL, was also
important.  These goals all had higher priority than producing a
conceptually beautiful language design.  The Scheme people were doing the
"clean" Lisp; there was no need to duplicate their work, since the goals
were completely different.
--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
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