Re: how expressive are they?

[Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs <address@hidden>]

   Subject: Re: how expressive are they?
   From: Trevor Blackwell <tlb@anybots.com>
   To: "ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu" <ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu>
   ...
   
   Guy's parodies are instructive, because they make you think about what
   you could afford to lose. Losing algebraic syntax (as opposed to
   Lisp-style arithmetic) is not too painful. Losing classes is a bit more
   painful. Losing functions makes programming very difficult indeed. So
   where do macros fit in this order?

Thank you very kindly.  However, you may have missed my intended
point about algebraic syntax: for those who complained about it
those many years ago, the preferred alternative was not Lisp
syntax, but assembly language.  Algebraic syntax was, in their view,
too opaque, obscuring what was really going in inside the computer.

--Guy Steele