Raffael Cavallaro wrote: > On 2006-12-17 07:54:28 -0500, Jon Harrop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: >> What if eager impurity isn't the "very nature" of the problem but, >> rather, is the very nature of Tilton's chosen solution? > > That's the whole point which you keep missing - that a programming > language is expressive precisely to the extent that it allows you to > express the solution in the *programmer's* chosen form, not the > paradigm imposed by the language.
That is the ideal, yes. In practice, different languages encourage you to use different solutions. For example, when faced with a problem best solved using pattern matching in Lisp, most Lisp programmers would reinvent an ad-hoc, informally specified and bug-ridden pattern matcher of their own. Do you not think that Lispers typically "compile" their high-level algorithms into low-level Lisp constructs like COND or IF? > You look down your nose at cells, but if that's the way kenny conceived > of the problem - as a graph of changing state, why should he be forced > to reconceptualize it according to someone else's notion of programming > correctness (be that pure functional or any other paradigm)? Kenny isn't being forced to do anything. > By asking this question you've implicitly admitted that to solve it *as > he thought of it* in a pure functional language would require > reconceptualizing it (i.e., the aforementioned "jumping through > hoops"). You are saying that solving it as he solved it requires a different solution. How does that make Lisp any different to the next language? > We don't want to reconceptualize everything according to a > particular paradigm, we want the flexibility to write the solution to > the problem in the terms we think and talk about it, not the > procrustean bed of pure functional semantics. Of the programming paradigms that can be implemented in Lisp, Lisp doesn't exactly make them easy. Moreover, every time you pick a random Lisp library off the wall to implement some feature already found in most other languages, you fragment the already tiny user base into even fewer people. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Objective CAML for Scientists http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/index.html?usenet -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
