Re:Not Lisp again (2009)
by groby_b on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @01:56PM
(#14248783)
Sigh. How soon they forgot. You create a thunk that provides the closure. Which used to be a common thing to do when you wrote C code.
Note: I'm not saying that C could express closures and first-class function objects anywhere near as neatly as Lisp. But the idea that only Lisp allowed you to use them, and C was the land of straightforward procedural code... does not represent what I saw back then.
Just as you can write FORTRAN code in any language, you can transfer ideas from other languages to C. What's great about Lisp is that it made the ideas easily accessible.
Re:Not Lisp again (2009)
by int_19h on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @07:26PM
(#14251634)
There's no way to create a thunk in portable C even today, much less back then. You had to do some form of machine code generation on the fly, which instantly limited it to some particular architecture / calling convention at the very least.
Note: I'm not saying that C could express closures and first-class function objects anywhere near as neatly as Lisp. But the idea that only Lisp allowed you to use them, and C was the land of straightforward procedural code... does not represent what I saw back then.
Just as you can write FORTRAN code in any language, you can transfer ideas from other languages to C. What's great about Lisp is that it made the ideas easily accessible.