Dear Bill, > -----Original Message----- > From: Bill Page [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2005 4:50 PM > To: Weiss, Juergen > Cc: axiom-developer@nongnu.org > Subject: RE: [Axiom-developer] RE: Boot vs. Lisp > > > Of course ANSI lisp includes 'destructuring-bind' and other > operators which support this kind of thing. > > http://www.cs.queensu.ca/software_docs/gnudev/gcl-ansi/gcl_443 > .html#SEC443 > http://www.bookshelf.jp/texi/onlisp/onlisp_19.html > > "Destructuring is a generalization of assignment. The > operators setq and setf do assignments to individual > variables. Destructuring combines assignment with access: > instead of giving a single variable as the first argument, > we give a pattern of variables, which are each assigned > the value occurring in the corresponding position in some > structure."
In MAC Lisp, I think, there was even a destructuring setq. One can extend the Common Lisp syntax by macros to get something like destructuring comparisons. (I did a google search a few days ago, for destructuring setq -- I found http://www.bookshelf.jp/texi/onlisp/onlisp_19.html) But I think the BOOT syntax is much more concise. Much of the current AXIOM code (interpreter and SPAD library compiler) operates on lists representing parse trees of the user input. Here the BOOT syntax is extremely handy. As I said, a total rewrite with different data structures may obsolete this advantage. But I think we are far away from that aim. And if a reimplementation is indeed going to happen, we should certainly consider A# as the implementation language. I cannot follow Tim's opinion, that it's level is too high (can't find the reference though). Regards Juergen Weiss Juergen Weiss | Universitaet Mainz, Zentrum fuer Datenverarbeitung, [EMAIL PROTECTED]| 55099 Mainz, Tel: +49(6131)39-26361, FAX: +49(6131)39-26407 _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
