Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Pascal Costanza]

Mark Wilson wrote:
> 
> On Thursday, October 9, 2003, at 10:43 PM, Kenny Tilton wrote:
> [snip]
> 
>>
>> But will one of Perl, Python, Ruby, Dylan or Smalltalk steal the 
>> prize? The only way to do that is to adopt sexprs and macros,
> 
> 
> Or linguistic elements that provide the same power as sexprs and macros. 
> There is more than one way to skin a cat.

I wouldn't mind to use a language that is at the same time at least as 
simple to use and at least as powerful as Lisp. In the end, it's just a 
tool.

> As a point of curiosity, are sexprs considered to be all that powerful? 
> I recall reading that in the creation of Lisp, sexprs were initially 
> considered a stopping point on the way to M-expressions.

It was John McCarthy's intention to introduce M-expressions into the 
language. He considered s-expressions as a mere interim solution for the 
very first Lisp implementations. It were the hackers who started to 
appreciate s-expressions as soon as they used them, and didn't want to 
adopt a different syntax anymore.

In fact, s-expressions are a way to more or less directly type in the 
abstract syntax tree that usually needs to be generated from source code 
in interpreters/compilers for other languages. Directly working with the 
AST gives you a lot more power than having to go through an intermediate 
level of syntax.


Pascal

-- 
Pascal Costanza               University of Bonn
mailto:costanza at web.de        Institute of Computer Science III
http://www.pascalcostanza.de  Römerstr. 164, D-53117 Bonn (Germany)