Fundamental Problems of Lisp

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Since i'm writing... n i wrote a lot in the past on diverse issues
scattered
in various essays... i'll sum some fundamental problems of lisp.

• Lisp relies on a regular nested syntax. However, the lisp syntax has
several
irregularities, that reduces such syntax's power and confuses the
language
semantics. (i.e. those «' # ; ` ,» chars.) (and whenever i tried to
get some
technical answer about this to clarify at least my own understanding,
the lisp
fuckheads muck and obfuscate the truth)

On Jul 13, 10:53 am, "xah...@gmail.com" gmail.com> wrote:

xahlee@gmail.com breaking news:

Xah, I love you, we should become friends!

There seems to be no real contents in your postings, only some pseudo
scientific Lisp bashing.
Exactly the same art I'm specialized in.

Congrats, keep up your good work! Together we will win them all!

Jon Harrop

Xah Lee wrote:
«
Fundamental Problems of Lisp
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/lisp_problems.html
»

Jon Harrop wrote:

I must say, sometimes i lookup to your courage in frequent cross
posting, even though i consider your posts are proper with respect to
the various forum's explicit or implicit charters. (though, i do see
your tendency to peddle your website, and freely inject your little
personal gripes about Mathematica or whatever)

Addendum:

in lisp communities, it is widely recognized that lisp's regular
syntax has the property that “code is data; data is code”. However,
there was never, clear, explanation what this means exactly.

Here's what it means exactly, in one concise paragarph.

A regular nested syntax, makes it easy (possible) to do source code
transformations with a lexical scan. (think of XML. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_transformation_language )

The consequence of the ability to do such source code transformation,
are many as i discussed in previous article. (see
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/lisp_problems.html (Among
which, is lisp's so-called “macros”, pattern matching or term
rewriting (lisp's so-called “macros” is simple form of so-called term-
rewriting).))

among lispers, often when people ask what it means about lisp's “code
is data; datais code”, usually they are unable to explain it exactly,
because they don't possess mathematician's analytic abilities. Here
i'll repeat, and please remember it.

On 13 juil, 16:53, "xah...@gmail.com" gmail.com> wrote:

On 15 juil, 22:32, "xah...@gmail.com" gmail.com> wrote:

xahlee@gmail.com wrote:

You're not Einstein, even though you probably believe you are.

Dear Rainer Joswig,

Rainer wrote:

Yeah, and?

I wrote: «A regular nested syntax, makes it possible to do systematic
source code transformation in a way that's also trivial to implement.
There are important consequences. Some of the examples are: lisp's
macros, structural pattern matching, term rewriting, source code dual
functioning as markup lang for presentation (e.g. word-processor,
Mathematica's “Notebook”), mathematical markup (e.g. MathML), in
general all benefits of XML, on-the-fly source code “formatting” for a
automatic, uniform, universal, source code display (aka “coding style
convention”).»

xahlee@gmail.com a écrit :