an oop question

[Julieta Shem]

ram at zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:

> Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> writes:
>>I don't see any overlap between these at the conceptual level.
>
>   It might come from early LISP dialects. In early LISPs, the
>   only basic means to combine data into a larger assembly of
>   data was the dotted pair and NULL (as an end marker). So,
>   whenever you wanted to create a data structure, you would
>   wonder how to build it from dotted pairs and NULLs.
>
>   You also had lists, of course, but these were themselves build
>   from dotted pairs and NULLs, as I explained in a recent post.
>
>   (I wrote "early LISP", because I don't know much about modern
>   "Lisp" dialects.)
>
>   And when people learn a new (programming) language, until they
>   become more confident in it, they start to emulate their
>   previous language(s) in it. Writing FORTRAN in Pascal, and
>   so on. So when you know Clojure and then come to Python, you
>   might wonder how to do Clojure things in Python. (Clojure
>   is a kind of Lisp.)

And that's very interesting.  It's a nice evidence of that conjecture
that the languages we use affect the way we see things.  Noam Chomsky
has been saying that the primary function of language is to be a tool of
thought rather than communication; communication is definitely important
and real, but not the primary reason why language was developed.