Language categories

[Neelakantan Krishnaswami]

In article <bivkor$m70$1 at terabinaries.xmission.com>, Thant Tessman wrote:
> Cameron Laird wrote:
>> In article <sDJ2b.1909$_F1.271943 at news20.bellglobal.com>,
>> Sean Ross <sross at connectmail.carleton.ca> wrote:
>> 
>>>>"Sean Ross" <sross at connectmail.carleton.ca> writes:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>(Lisp, Dylan, Haskell, ocaml, or some other functional programming
>>>>>language).
>> 
>> Someone needs to talk with the googlers; REBOL and Dylan
>> are not functional languages.  And Lisp ... well, Lisp is
>> universal, so let's let that pass.
> 
> Not to re-open that can o' worms, but last time I looked, Dylan 
> supported functional programming style just fine. If memory serves, its 
> word for 'lambda' is 'method.' I've never heard of REBOL.

Yeah, Dylan is basically Scheme + CLOS, with a Modula-style syntax. So
it's a functional language.

REBOL is more interesting. The original interpreter was written by Joe
Marshall, and he wrote it so that it supported lexically-scoped
closures (and maybe tail-recursion too?). This makes it count as an
fpl, in my book. However, the second version was a rewrite that lost
those features, and as a result it's not an fpl anymore.


-- 
Neel Krishnaswami
neelk at cs.cmu.edu