Why aren't we all speaking LISP now?

[Grant Edwards]

In article <mailman.989692041.20333.python-list at python.org>, Neil Schemenauer wrote:
>Grant Edwards wrote:
>> On Sat, 12 May 2001 16:35:51 GMT, Courageous <jkraska1 at san.rr.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >>  1. Python doesn't have tail-recursion (AFAIK).
>> >
>> >Too many people have taken a lisp class and think that
>> >recursion matters all that much to lisp programmers. Not so.
>> 
>> Really?  Almost all of the Scheme programs I've written use
>> tail-recursion.
>
>Common Lisp is quite different than Scheme.  I think Python is
>usually compared to Common Lisp, not Scheme.  Common Lisp
>programmers use iteration a lot more than tail recursion.

Interesting.  My only exposer to "real" Lisp (as opposed to
Scheme) was in school, and all of the examples shown used
recursion.  Scheme apparently differs from Lisp (at least in
usage) more that I was led to believe.

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