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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Symbol space in Scheme v. Lisp
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Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 16:46:34 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.misc:20135 comp.lang.lisp:16496 comp.lang.scheme:11852

In article <3g0sah$ssc@agate.berkeley.edu> bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey) writes:
>gpzF93@hamp.hampshire.edu (everything) writes:
>>Does anybody know why Steele and Sussman decided on the "one-space"
>>for Scheme over the "n-space" which LISP uses?
>
>Well I can't speak for Steele or Sussman, but to me there seem to be
>two clearly compelling arguments, one theoretical and one practical,
>although they turn out to be closely connected:
>
>1.  In the whole Lisp culture we make a big fuss about procedure-as-data,
>a/k/a first-class procedures, a/k/a a procedure is just as good a thing
>as a number or a list.  Well, if that's true, it follows that a procedure
>ought to be able to be the value of a variable.

But in an n-space Lisp, a procedure can still be the value of a
variable (as you presumably already know).  I think the real issue
here is that n-space Lisps make this a somewhat exceptional case
(in that it requires more work, as in point 2).

>2.  And the practical argument is, look at the horrible ugly syntactic
>contortions that CL has to use, to get around its choice: that #' business.
>Try explaining that to a freshman computer science student!

And don't forget funcall.

-- jeff
