On 2007-06-21, Douglas Alan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Neil Cerutti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> Seriously, maybe Python looks like 'blub' (thanks, Paul >> Graham), to the skilled Lisp user, but it makes a lot of other >> languages look like 'blub', too, including, sometimes, Lisp: >> Lisp has to 'blub' generators. > > Actually, Scheme has first class continuations, and with > continuations and macros you could easily implement generators, > and I'm sure someone has. Whether such a library has been > widely adopted for Scheme, though, I have no idea.
A strength of Lisp is the ability to cherry-pick features from different Lisp implementations, as seen here. Common Lisp has powerful macro facilities and generates fast code, but hasn't got continuations. Scheme has continuations, but is *not* fast, and has simpler, more complicated macro facilities. ;) > "Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment > experience you will have when you finally get it; that > experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of > your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot." > -- Eric Raymond You don't need to learn Lisp to get the ephiphany, though. Haskell, Ocaml or ML would likely be more enlightening to a Python programmer, who will see much of Lisp as old hat. That said, I wouldn't give up the summer I spent studying _Simply Scheme_. Writing recursive code seemed totally alien to me before that. On the other hand, _Simply Scheme_ uses a logo-like adaptation of Scheme for 90% of the course, wisely disguising the total weird unintuitiveness of list manipulation until the student has been fully brainwashed. ;) -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
