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

[David F. Place]

On Sep 21, 2005, at 3:53 AM, Immanuel Litzroth wrote:

> Ever heard of the loop macro?

Yes, the loop macro is a good example for the argument against lisp.   
Lisp has features to support iteration that date back to the time  
before it was understood that tail recursion is equivalent to  
iteration. In fact, even in the early '90s most common lisp compilers  
didn't implement tail-merging.  I doubt there is any program  
implemented using the loop macro that couldn't be more elegantly  
implemented recursively.  In fact, when writing in lisp or scheme, I  
always write recursively now that I can depend on compilers to tail- 
merge.


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David F. Place
mailto:d at vidplace.com