exceptions

[Alexander Schmolck]

[This requires less time than replying to your previous post, so I'll do it
first]

hungjunglu at yahoo.com (Hung Jung Lu) writes:
> Therefore, Lisp seems not nearly as flexible as Io.

It would seem you are completely clueless about Lisp, so there isn't much
point discussing this statement.

If you are at all interested in programming languages as such I think you'd be
well rewarded if you at least have a good look at scheme (CL is also well
worth some study). Whether one likes scheme as a practical programming
language or not, I think it's difficult not to find it invaluable as a sort of
conceptual assembler. A great number of programming paradigms can be concisely
and illuminatingly expressed and reasoned about using just a handful of the
powerful abstractions such as, e.g. (properly tail recursive) lambda, call/cc,
cons, symbols and defmacro¹.


In addition, the majority of excellent computer science books I've come across
(and many great articles) use scheme or some other lisp and, even better, are
often freely available on the web²!


'as

¹ defmacro is not part of the standard, but generally available, and, I think,
  much easier conceptualized than scheme's more complicated hygenic macro
  systems.

² Just to mention the most famous: 
  http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html