Re: feature incompatibilities

[Paul Graham <address@hidden>]

You're right that you don't have to use lists for syntax.
However, you'd have to use lists (or something equivalent)
to represent e.g. the arguments in a call, so you'd still
face a problem if you couldn't have a collection of 
arbitrary different types of objects.  Or am I missing
something?  --pg

--Jan-Willem Maessen wrote:
> Paul Graham writes:
> > The worst one for me is static typing vs. lists of arbitrary
> > objects.  Type rules that don't allow lists of arbitrary 
> > objects effectively make macros impossible, since in the 
> > general case (implicit in CL, explicit in Arc) you want to
> > be able to insert actual objects in macro expansions, not
> > merely their representations.  --pg
> 
> Wait --- who said we had to use lists to represent syntax?  In a
> strongly-typed language we'd surely want to use a structure with
> appropriate (probably existential) types.
> 
> -Jan-Willem Maessen
> jmaessen@alum.mit.edu