John writes - >Of course implementing something like a queue which has state >(side-effects) is not pure functional programming, but real LISP >programmers don't worry too much about that.
John sounds like a real LISP programmer (he's being hiding that from us until now ;) - and I am interpreting him to be confirming the point Peter Seibel is making in the book I referenced, i.e. that many folks know of LISP via Scheme and therefore tend to understand LISP to be more purist functional than it is in practice. My impetus in approaching LISP would be to become a better Python programmer (presuming that it is awfully late in the game to try to become anything of a LISP programmer), and that does have something to do, in my mind, with more exposure to functional programming. But concluded that Scheme sounded a bit austere on this account, and taking Seibel at his word, I would be hoping to get, through LISP, to functional thinking within a multi-paradigm context - which should be easier to translate into Pythonic thinking . Almost thought I'd get away with skipping this step - with Guido talking about stripping out much of the functional syntax from the Python core. But then decorators come onto the scene. And while they are not of great practical importance to me at this stage, it is of some importance to me - on general principle - to feel less stupid when staring at one. The LISP route, is I am sure, a very, very (very, very) long way around to solving this immediate issue. But, again, learning is funny. And I go by instinct, which seems to be telling me that the long way around is the best available shortcut in this particular case. My instincts are often wrong, BTW. But I am convinced they beat the average, with the average being listening to people who don't happen to be me. Which is why to the extent I am educated at all - past some baseline - it has necessarily been mostly self-education. Which makes me more dependant, not less, on resources folks are kind enough to share. But it's also true that I have had to work myself to a point where the $60 for a book that would help is not something I need to ruminate over all too much. It is unfortunate that there were more brain cells firing during the considerable time when that was not true. Another example of youth being wasted on the wrong age group. Art _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
