From ... Path: supernews.google.com!sn-xit-02!supernews.com!isdnet!newsfeed1.telenordia.se!news.algonet.se!algonet!neel.uni2.net!uio.no!Norway.EU.net!127.0.0.1!nobody From: Erik Naggum Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Pass by reference Date: 18 Nov 2000 05:14:20 +0000 Organization: Naggum Software; vox: +47 800 35477; gsm: +47 93 256 360; fax: +47 93 270 868; http://naggum.no; http://naggum.net Lines: 25 Message-ID: <3183513260645961@naggum.net> References: <3183311478192040@naggum.net> <3183389778776917@naggum.net> <8v30kj$60rs$1@fido.engr.sgi.com> <3183480250548685@naggum.net> <3183502506080424@naggum.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: oslo-nntp.eunet.no 974524621 4614 195.0.192.66 (18 Nov 2000 05:17:01 GMT) X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@eunet.no NNTP-Posting-Date: 18 Nov 2000 05:17:01 GMT mail-copies-to: never User-Agent: Gnus/5.0803 (Gnus v5.8.3) Emacs/20.7 Xref: supernews.google.com comp.lang.lisp:3978 * Joe Marshall | 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.