[Haskell] Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell versus Lisp

[Glynn Clements]

David F. Place wrote:

> I don't deny that all of the things you mentioned are wonderful  
> indeed.  I just wonder if they really could only be done in lisp or  
> even most conveniently.

Obviously, if you can do it in Lisp, you can do it in any
Turing-complete language; in the worst case, you just write a Lisp
interpreter.

As for convenience: syntax matters. The equivalence of code and data
in Lisp lets you write your own syntactic sugar. You're still bound by
the lexical (token-level) grammar, although reader macros mean that
isn't much of a restriction.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>