Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Andrew Dalke]

Pascal Costanza:
> And, as Paul Graham put it, if you take a language and "add that final
> increment of power, you can no longer claim to have invented a new
> language, but only to have designed a new dialect of Lisp". (see
> http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html )

What about a language for quantum based computing?  I
know the perl folk have a stab at emulating such a language
  http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/08/08/quantum.html
Are there programming possibilities in manipulating ensembles
of possible expressions?  Eg, an O(sqrt(N)) search of all
possible algorithms which solve an optimization problem
might prove interesting.

Hmmm, if a problem can be solved in a language of 32 operators
using, say, 50 of those operators, then it can be found after only
O(sqrt(32**50)) == O(2**30) steps.

I'm sure there are other possibilites which are more realistic though.

The fact that such hardware does not exist shouldn't
be a limitation.  Babbage's code worked on a machine that
was never built (*and* it had the potential ability to modify
it's own input, making Lisp a 'dialect' of that ur-language),
and Turing's work was also on a theoretical machine.

But then, I'm just a speaker of a dialect of Proto-Indo-European
and my language hasn't improved on the original over the last
few thousand years.  ;)

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com