Re: What?

["Jason Trenouth" <address@hidden>]

Hi Rainer,

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rainer Joswig" <joswig@lispmachine.de>
To: <info-dylan@ai.mit.edu>
Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2002 12:15 PM
Subject: Re: What?


> In article <000f01c24120$53941dd0$9c8bfd3e@wilde>,
>  "Jason Trenouth" <jason.trenouth@bigfoot.com> wrote:
>
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "mw" <nsp4@mac.com>
> > To: <info-dylan@ai.mit.edu>
> > Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2002 2:45 AM
> > Subject: What?
> >
> >
> > > What is this language? I have never heard of it before.
> >
> > One reductionist breakdown might be:
> >
> > Dylan = Scheme + CLOS + Smalltalk + Pascal
> >
> > Scheme for basic semantics.
>
> What is that exactly? Lisp1, tail-recursion, "?" naming convention for
> predicates. What else?

Other folks have mentioned the "!" convention for some destructive
operations.

There's also #t and #f instead of t and nil.

> > Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) for the object system, and exception
> > handling.
>
> What about: parameter list , keywords, numerics, setters,
> multiple values, lots of the library functions, ... ?
> Looks a lot like Common Lisp to me.

Yes, I should have said ",etc" ... :-j And I did say "basic" for the Scheme
bit...

However, don't let KMP hear you say that Dylan looks a lot like Common Lisp.
He feels Common Lisp benefits by being a Lisp2. Also KMP would probably feel
that too much was dropped. Dylan is not just just borrowing from Common Lisp
it is also deliberately _not_ borrowing from Common Lisp, eg:

    standard s-expression IO
    eval
    compile, compile-file, make-load-form
    slot-value
    :after, :before, :around methods
    exotic method combinations
    formatting of Roman numerals in two styles!! :-j
    etc etc

That is, I think that the Dylan inventors 'tipped their hat' in the
direction of Scheme when defining the scope of the language. It's not just
in the details, it's how many details are in. :-j

__Jason