Adam Turoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 10:16:50AM +0000, Andy Wardley wrote: >> On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 12:55:56PM -0800, Rich Morin wrote: >> > I'm not a Lisp enthusiast, by and large, but I think he makes some >> > interesting observations on language design. Take a look if you're >> > feeling adventurous... >> >> I can't help feeling slightly deflated. Given the chance to re-design >> Lisp from scratch, the tasks on the top of my TODO list to address would >> be: >> >> * getting rid of some/all those damn parenthesis >> * renaming cons/car/cdr to something meaningful >> >> Alas, these are about the only parts he's not changing. He promises that >> Arc will have a syntax one day, but there isn't one yet. > > These slides are over a year old. There hasn't been much of Arc since > Paul Graham's early musings on it. But one of the things he did do was > rename lambda to fn. This is proof that the holy grails can be tossed > out of the window. > > The problem with cons/car/cdr is that they're fundemental operations. > Graham *has* learned from perl, and is receptive to the idea that > fundemental operators should be huffman encoded (lambda -> fn). It > would be easy to simply rename car/cdr to first/rest, but that loses > the huffman nature of car/cdr.
ISTR that he was also a fan on the 'composibility' of car and cdr, giving operators like (caar list), which means (car (car list)). I can see where he's coming from, but I can also see that those tricks could also be dismissed as clever dickery.
