Subject: Re: Lisp & SICP From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 2000/05/15 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3167397352936809@naggum.no> * Andrew Cooke <andrew@andrewcooke.free-online.co.uk> | I'm not sure what the difference between confused and seriously | confused is, but sorry for getting the name wrong (not used Lisp for | a while) - I meant that in Common Lisp you have to explicitly call a | function when passed into a routine; in Scheme it's not necessary. If you haven't used Lisp for a while, it's a very good idea to make sure the answers you give in a public forum are not "buggy". | (It makes CL code look comparatively more messy, but how can you cope | without variable names like "list"?! ;-) Please bad-mouth Common Lisp in comp.lang.scheme -- there's no value in having random Schemers talk about "messy" here. I'll take care of bad-mouthing Scheme here in exchange for you take it elsewhere. Personally, I find it interminably unnerving to see arguments to functions crop up in the functional position, because it means whatever is in the functional position everywhere has to be compared to the arguments, as well as all the lexical bindings. Using a simple syntactical vehicle like funcall to communicate the intent of using a _variable_ as a function as opposed to the standard meaning of the named symbol is obviously a really good idea, and it would have made Scheme much more palatable had it differentiated between the "global" values of symbols and the lexical values defined within. | PS maybe seriously confused means something like "sufficiently clear | for Erik to understand what I meant". That's about as smart an explanation as confusing apply with funcall. If you don't want to be labeled seriously confused, a good thing to do is to pay more attention to detail, not even less than before. #:Erik -- If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.