r...@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes: > Greg Ewing <greg.ew...@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. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
