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Re: Real-life examples of lexical binding in Emacs Lisp


From: Emanuel Berg
Subject: Re: Real-life examples of lexical binding in Emacs Lisp
Date: Sat, 30 May 2015 18:03:01 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.4 (gnu/linux)

Rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

> I'd say you are getting this from the wrong end.
> Today (2015) dynamic scoping is considered a bug In
> 1960 when Lisp was invented of course people did not
> realize this. This is just a belated bug-fix

John MacCarthy's LISP first appeared in 1958 according
to the Wikipedia LISP article [1]. But that might be
a definition issue. "First appeared" refers to when
"the specification" appeared in a paper. It says:

    Lisp was invented by John McCarthy in 1958 while
    he was at the Massachusetts Institute of
    Technology (MIT). McCarthy published its design in
    a paper in Communications of the ACM in 1960 ...

But then they write:

    McCarthy's 1958 paper ... [?]

Also, in the article:

    The first complete Lisp compiler, written in Lisp,
    was implemented in 1962 by Tim Hart and Mike Levin
    at MIT.

So let's say 1962 and be home free. If we go with the
specification definition we might as well say Ada
Lovelace was the first programmer or something
equally bizarre.

> Ive been collecting material on history of
> functional programming and looking for early
> references on 'Lisp-as-a-functional-language'.
> Note I am not asking for early references on Lisp or
> on FP but on Lisp as FP. I know of Henderson's 1980
> book on FP that uses Lisp. I'm looking for something
> earlier and more 'mainstream'

FP is a programming paradigm. It is a model.
The purpose of a model is not to describe reality but
to be a pair of glasses that will enhance our
understanding of the mechanisms of (some part of)
reality. I some contexts models are necessary since
what they model are totally abstract and/or all-but
impossible to access in other ways (e.g., pre-ancient
history, distant space, etc.).

Contrary to this situation, Lisp is right in front of
us. There is no modelling in the world that will
enhance our understanding of Lisp more than we write,
say, 50 lines of it every day. And, doing that, one
might actually do something useful while at it!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LISP&printable=yes

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573


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