Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!simon
From: simon@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Simon Brooke)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Redefining read-eval-print loop.
Message-ID: <593@dcl-csvax.comp.lancs.ac.uk>
Date: 25 Oct 88 08:59:40 GMT
References: <3185@mit-amt>
Reply-To: simon@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Simon Brooke)
Organization: Common Knowledge
Lines: 33

In article <3185@mit-amt> sokolov@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Michael Sokolov) writes:
>In article <589@dcl-csvax.comp.lancs.ac.uk> simon@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Simon Brooke) writes:
>
>> And if we aren't allowed to redefine the way the top-level read - eval
>>- print loop works, then the language certainly isn't as expressive: there is
>>a large category of things it can't express.
>
>	It is still possible to redefine the way the read-eval-print
>loop works; you just have to wrap your own read-eval-print loop around
>the lisp's, making sure to include an unwind-protect so that your loop
>won't get aborted out of.  The only tricky thing is that you may have
>to write an s-expression parser to do this just right, but without the
>niceties: 
>
Yes, ok, there are butchers jobs you can use to work round any barbarity.
That is, with respect, not the point. The ANSI Common LISP committee has
already done immeasurable damage to a language which is quite as much my
property as theirs. Unfortunately, they have hegemony, and eventually my
customers are going to force me to use their abomination because it is 'the
standard'. They now propose a futher barbarity: they propose to alter the
system so that a class of function symbols has a different semantics from all 
other function symbols. This *cannot* be a good thing to do! The elegance 
and power of LISP lie precisely in its simple, general semantics, and in its
malleability. If the ANSI Lisp committee want to write in FORTRAN, that's
fine, let them. BUT LEAVE MY LANGUAGE ALONE!


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