On Sun, 22 May 2011 15:47:53 -0700, Xah Lee wrote: > this is important but i think most lispers and functional programers > still don't know it. > > Functional Programing: stop using recursion, cons. Use map & vectors. > > 〈Guy Steele on Parallel Programing〉 > http://xahlee.org/comp/Guy_Steele_parallel_computing.html > > btw, lists (as cons, car, cdr) in the lisp world has always been some > kinda cult. Like, if you are showing some code example and you happened > to use lisp vector datatype and not cons (lists) and it doesn't really > matter in your case, but some lisper will always rise up to bug you, > either as innocent curious question or attacking you for not > “understanding” lisp. (just as other idiocies happen in other lang that > lispers see but other langs don't see) > > it's interesting to me that all other high level langs: Mathematica, > perl, python, php, javascript, all don't have linked list as lisp's > list. It's also curious that somehow lispers never realises this. I've > been having problems with lisp's cons ever since i'm learning Scheme > Lisp in 1998 (but mostly the reason is language design at syntax and > lack of abstraction level in calling “cons, car, cdr” stuff, without > indexing mechanism). Realizing the algorithmic property and parallel- > execution issues of linked list is only recent years.
You might be interested in Clojure, then. Lists are more abstracted, like in Scheme, and vectors and also dictionaries/maps and sets are first class citizens along side lists. And unlike Scheme, Clojure has good library/host interop support. You can write real-world applications in it without spontaneously combusting. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
