20 Aug
2001
20 Aug
'01
3:24 a.m.
I hope I'm not too much of an oxygen source here, but...
On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:
I've been told that LISP stands for Lots of Insane Stupid Parentheses.
On the other hand, they're not that bad. I like Lisp-like languages.
(0) Prefix notation throughout the language is nicely consistent.
(1) Little or no need for precedence rules is somewhat nice.
(2) Proper indentation and editor can alleviate paren hell.
I guess those reasons don't really seem tera-compelling. To each, his
own.
But could any language have punctuation more demented
than C?
How about some of the darker corners of sh(1)?
Encouraged? Some of the teachers won't let their
students do a
program to count to 10 WITHOUT recursion! They can't imagine doing
something like Fibonacci sequence WITHOUT using recursion.
Those teachers are probably of the mathy kind. Either their imagination
is limited to recursion, or they think they're being much less deceptive
by using recursion instead of the special cases of it rolled into a
particular language's looping constructs. Either way, it's just going to
be confusing to new students.
How can you do a non-trivial program with recursion
without stack
overflow?
Very carefully, but it can happen.
while(*T++=*S++);
Was this an actual program fragment?
--
Jeffrey S. Sharp
jss(a)subatomix.com