Python's Lisp heritage

[Siegfried Gonzi]

"James J. Besemer" <jb at cascade-sys.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:mailman.1019299357.11513.python-list at python.org...

> Seems to me the more prominent genetic similarities are the overall
semantics: late binding, garbage collection, lists and >sequences as a way
of life.  Also, the fact that functions are values that may be free rebound
to other names.  The >semantics of and/or are rarely
> encountered outside of lisp and derivatives.  MAP, APPLY, and especially
LAMBDA also are pretty unique to Lisp.  >This is VERY like Lisp and very
UNLIKE "Algol like" languages.

It is correct that they are not Algol-like; but map, apply,lambda are
typical for functional languages like Clean, Haskell,...

What Python --from my pragmatic point of view-- has in common with Lisp is
the nice feature that you can put in your return  list different objects,

e.g. [[1,2,3],["334.233,"Ein bloeder Oesterreicher",777],array]

In Clean for example you can not easily construct that, except you write
some form of a struct (or special tuple constructs). Clean is a strict
(strongly typed) language and this behavior is visible in every situation.

And it is possible in Python (sorry I know only the idle) to build your
functions in the command-line (every Common Lisp environment provides you
this). I often have heard that CLOS (Common Lisp Object System) lets you
change your class objects on the fly, I do not have any experience with that
and I am not sure how this relates to Python (my Python object oriented
programming experience is zero).

Python shows very often its C heritage, whereas Common Lisp is devoid of
that impression. From this point of view Lisp is much different from Python;
Lisp really went its own way.

S. Gonzi