What can you do in LISP that you can't do in Python

[Alex Martelli]

"mikel evins" <himself at mikelevins.com> wrote in message
news:9ej50e$35u at dispatch.concentric.net...
    ...
> How, in Python, do you
> 1) build new syntax

http://incolor.inebraska.com/jepler/pyhtml/ may be the
best extant example, I believe.  It starts with Aycock's
SPARK, http://www.csr.uvic.ca/~aycock/python/, and moves
on from there.  If I understand correctly, it's *NOT*
something you'd want to do "casually" and that would be
appropriate to demonstrate in the limited confines of
a post -- but then, IS adding new syntax to produce a
different language something that SHOULD be "casual"?-)

Quixote's PTL, http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/python/quixote/,
may be another example, but I don't really know much
about its implementation strategy.


> 2) capture a lexical environment

You mean, as in "from __future__ import nested_scopes"
(in 2.1 -- not needed in 2.2), or what else?


Alex