Re: Lua is about to become history

["Hisham Muhammad" <hisham.hm@...>]

On 5/3/06, Norman Ramsey <nr@eecs.harvard.edu> wrote:
>  > > Paul Graham made a remark to the effect that all languages attempt to turn
>  > > themselves into LISP as they evolve.
>  >
>  > I guess he really thinks so; but it is not true :)
>  >
>  > "Original" Lisp had no lexical closures, no pattern matching, no
>  > coroutines (or threads or continuations, for that matter), no API to
>  > other languages, no exception handling, no module system, and I think it
>  > did not require proper tail calls.  (What it had always excelled was in
>  > "extensible semantis", aka macros.)
>
> Hurrah!  I've never liked that bit of parochialism and am happy to see
> it debunked.  (Though I do think parallel evolution of languages,
> e.g., in acquiring lexical closures, is a fascinating phenomenon.)

Hear! Hear!

> Now, to get really off topic, what shall we do about 'every program
> evolves until it is powerful enough to read mail'? :-)

Well, once something is already Lua-extensible, it's just a matter of
'require'ing a POP3 module, isn't it? ;-)

-- Hisham