Subject: Re: Pass by reference
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: 18 Nov 2000 05:14:20 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3183513260645961@naggum.net>

* Joe Marshall <jrm@content-integrity.com>
| A simple example may make it easier to understand the concept where a
| more realistic example may hide the concept in a jumble of irrelevant
| detail.

  I think simple examples are counter-productive because they do not
  show the _normal_ complexity of the situation in which something makes
  sense.  That's why "hello, world" programs are so fantastically useless.

  We have a long tradition of suffering from people who learned Lisp as
  an example of something rather trivial that never explained why Lisp
  was a good choice -- anything else would be a good choice, too -- nor
  when Lisp would be a good choice.

| But isn't that what modern languages such as Java do?

  Yeah, that's the "misery loves company" argument for doing something
  painful.

#:Erik
-- 
  ALGORITHM: a procedure for solving a mathematical problem in a finite
  number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation.
  ALGOREISM: a procedure for solving an electoral problem in a finite
  number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation.