On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 03:25:53PM +1000, konrad Zielinski wrote:
> I guess rules of thumb from other lisps about not over using symbol
> property lists apply to Pico Lisp as well, if for slightly different
> reasons.
Yes. It seems that property lists are somewhat deprecated in other Lisps.
Allegedly because properties are "always global", which I think is not
true, since properties are not more global than symbol values and
function definitions. And as you showed in your example, you can make
perfectly local properties by using anonymous symbols (with 'new'
('gensym' in other Lisps)).
Probably the main reason why other Lisps don't use properties so much is
that symbols generally lost importance in those languages. Scheme
doesn't even have symbols at all.
In PicoLisp, however, symbol properties still play an important role.
They are the only way (besides lists) to create compound data
structures, and the object system and database entities depend on them.
This is the reason why there are so many property manipulation functions
in PicoLisp, like '=:', ':', ';' '::' and 'prop', in addition to the
standard 'put' and 'get' functions.
Cheers,
- Alex
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