Re: Var-free programming (slightly off-topic)

[Dan Weinreb <address@hidden>]

   Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2001 12:00:29 -0500
   From: Scott McKay <swm@hotdispatch.com>

   Common Lisp is especially bad: many things that should be libraries
   (streams, pathnames, advanced math functions) just got crammed into
   the core language.  They should have been, at the very least, in their
   own package and/or described as "higher layers".

(Sorry for making this point at you when you already mde it at me first.)

Actually at the beginning of the Common Lisp effort, I remember that
there was talk of having a "white pages", "yellow pages", and maybe
other sets of pages, and libraries were going to be separated out.
Somehow that never got done.

Thanks for all the clarifications.

   Oh, I left out the following because it is too obvious:

     (6) Automatic memory management

Yes, good point, and clearly we have to emphasize that when applying
the English word "weight" to a language, we are not talking about "the
size of the language implementation (compilers, interpreters,
libraries, runtimes) in lines of code" by any means, as one might
at first think.