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Re:Dialects of Lisp by Locke1689 on Friday February 22, 2013 @02:22PM (#5266142)
I have no idea what you're talking about. Grossman's course is barely covering an introduction to programming languages (literally, the course my sophomore year of college covering the same material was called "introduction to programming languages").

I guess you could say that there's nothing "special" about Haskell, but the same would be true of Arc. I think Racket is the real champion in Arc -- a truly flexible programming language laboratory.

Re:Dialects of Lisp by dschiptsov on Saturday February 23, 2013 @02:15AM (#5268869)
His course covers the ideas behind so-called functional programming paradigm - high-order functions , environments, lexical scooping, closures and the standard idioms, including currying and lazyness. This course about concepts behind programming languages, not languages themselves.
Re:Dialects of Lisp by Locke1689 on Saturday February 23, 2013 @04:21AM (#5269099)
Yeah. That's an introduction. You basically didn't mention anything that wasn't covered in the untyped lambda calculus at the beginning of the last century.
Re:Dialects of Lisp by dschiptsov on Sunday February 24, 2013 @12:41PM (#5275061)
Yeah, but that is enough for computers to work.)

Inside a computer everything is a number - sometimes a number represent itself, sometimes it is a pointer (a number of a byte, an offset) and sometimes it is a code, a number of an unicode character, etc.

The key idea there is that a pointer points to everything, value has a type, not a pointer. There are no pointers-to-integers along with pointers-to-booleans and pointers-to-strings. There are only numbers here.

Having one kind of pointer for all is the semantics of untyped lamda calculus. We could cons everything with everything, we could have heterogeneous lists, tuples, whatever.

Well, it seems that untyped lambda calculus are good-enough.) Perfection is achieved when there is nothing to remove, and not adding features is sometimes more wise.

Re:Dialects of Lisp by kyllo on Friday February 22, 2013 @07:43PM (#5267923)
Yeah, Grossman's course covers SML, Racket, and Ruby. Haskell is not even part of the course at all.