Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!think!barmar From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Object in form's function position. Message-ID: <37400@think.UUCP> Date: 12 Mar 89 23:28:55 GMT References: <46129@linus.UUCP> Sender: news@think.UUCP Reply-To: barmar@brigit.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin) Distribution: usa Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA Lines: 27 Many members of X3J13 (the ANSI committee standardizing Common Lisp) agree that separate function and value cells are inferior (I'm not one of them). We've had much discussion about the issue, and even used to have a subcommittee investingating it. The previously-mentioned paper by Gabriel and Pitman is basically the result of that investigation. The most important result of our discussion has been the concensus that in this case compatibility is more important than language purity. MacLisp, Zetalisp, and Common Lisp all have separate function and variable namespaces, and it would be a major incompatibility to change this in the ANSI standard. A secondary result was the realization that functions and variables are not the only things named by symbols, so merging these two namespaces would not be the "grand unification" many people expect. For example, symbols also have property list cells, and they are used to name classes and data types. We had been calling Common Lisp "Lisp-2" and Scheme "Lisp-1", but now it appears that the issue is "Lisp-N" versus "Lisp-N-1". Those of us in the Lisp-N camp believe that objecting to just one of these namespaces is half-hearted and inconsistent. Barry Margolin Thinking Machines Corp. barmar@think.com {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar