On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 12:16 PM, Chris Seberino <cseber...@gmail.com> wrote: > I've heard it said, by no less a guru than Peter Norvig, that Python is a lot > like Lisp without the parentheses.... at least for the basics of Python. > > For pedagogical reasons, I'm wondering if it would be easy to implement a big > subset of Python in Scheme. > > The basics of Scheme or Lisp are amazingly easy to implement.
Because parsing and unparsing (aka printing) are so trivial for s-expressions > Would implementing a subset of Python in a Scheme subset be a clever way > to easily implement a lot of Python? At the innards of lisp and python are garbage collected data structures. Building one with the other gets you that for free [Doing it in a lower level language like C is what invokes the humorous: Greenspuns tenth law] So yes in that one respect what you say is true. But then theres also (apart from parsing) all kinds of semantic differences eg: - exceptions - modules - OOP milarky - C interfacing in Baskin Robbins number of flavours - carefully crafted portable veneer on top of intrinsically non portable OSes All these have to be handled one way or other > > (This isn't for practical reasons....I'm just curious.) A crucial difference between python and lisp is that python is practical and lisp is utopian -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list