Why don't people like lisp?

[prunesquallor at comcast.net]

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak at knm.org.pl> writes:

> On Thu, 23 Oct 2003 19:35:05 -0400, Jon S. Anthony wrote:
>
>> The above example (with some differing details I think) is given by
>> Paul Graham in 2-3 pages of code in On Lisp in the Nondeterminism
>> chapter.
>
> In Scheme it doesn't use macros but continuations.
>
> On Lisp's implementation of continuations for Common Lisp requires
> changing the way functions are written (=defun, =values, =bind, =apply,
> =funcall, =lambda). Writing it in a more natural style requires a code
> walker ("beyond the scope of this book"), so it's not reusing the language
> but reimplementing all the control structures in order to CPS-transform
> everything. I don't see how a code walker can CPS-transform primitive
> functions defined in C which call back to Lisp (e.g. mapcar) - how does it
> do it?

You don't need to CPS convert everything because the backtracking
continuations are upwards only.