Re: What would your ideal language be like...

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

>Whether this kind of extensibitility needs to be done with Lisp-style
>macros, or can be done with closures and other mechanisms, is not really
>the point here; at the level of this email it is pretty much just an
>implementation detail.  The ability to have a single language that can
>be extended to handle specific domains well is the real point.

>IMHO, this ability doesn't yet seem to exist, or at least not nearly
>as strongly as it did in Lisp, in any of the modern "mainstream"
>languages.  Why that is the case is a whole separate discussion, which
>I think is extremely interesting but would be rather a digression
>at this point.
Dan: Please don't abandon this thread :) I find it interesting too,
and I'd very much like to hear others thoughts on this issue.

Personally speaking -- (and this point has come up before on this list)
-- what goes in the system package (loop and lists are in, but
threads, sockets and smp support are out :) entirely characterize the
boundary that I find most interesting.