expressions vs. statements

[Paul Graham <address@hidden>]

This is actually a question people on this list might
have interesting opinions about.  Does distinguishing 
between expressions and statements buy you anything in 
expressive power?  I have often wondered about what
the point of this distinction was...

--- Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net> wrote:
> Paul Graham wrote:
> > 
> > Ack, forgot a big one:
> > 
> > 5.5  Programs are trees of expressions, each consisting of
> > an operator plus zero or more arguments, which are evaluated
> > depth-first, each expression yielding a value.  (This is why
> > you never see an explicit return in Lisp except to get out of
> > the middle of a block.)
> 
> Python programs use return all over the place. And Python has a
> strong
> distinction between expressions and statements. That's a big part of
> why
> I think that the affinity with Lisp is not as clear as it seems at
> first.
> 
>  Paul Prescod


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