Re: Closures versus objects

If Lisp was re-written today, I'd guess that there would be more use  
of generic functions for things like length. Then we would have:

(length "butter")  ==> 6
(length #(1 2 3))  ==> 3

and so on...

Unfortunately, Common Lisp had to incorporate 30-years of working  
implementations into its standard without offending anyone (too  
much!). Though lacking in elegance, this gives it the nutty crunchy  
kruft many of us have come to love <smile>.

that's my two cents,

On Feb 16, 2007, at 1:00 PM, Matt Hellige wrote:

> On 2/16/07, Joe Marshall <[email protected]> wrote:
>> But Ruby syntax has a major disadvantage!  Suppose you wanted to  
>> late-bind the
>> method name?  In Scheme you'd do this:
>>
>> (let ((method   (select-method  len first last)))
>>   (method "abcd"))
>>
>> but you can't bind the name of a method identifier in Ruby:
>>
>>   method = select-method (len, first, last)
>>   s = "abcd"
>>   s.method
>>
>> won't work.
>
> To be fair, the ease of this kind of thing is usually considered a
> major advantage of Python, Ruby and friends:
>
> method = "length"
> s = "abcd"
> s.send(method)
>
> so the syntax is a bit different, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing,
> in this case. It's clear to me that literal method names (length) and
> variables holding method names (method) should appear different in
> code. It's also clear to me that calling literal method names is so
> overwhelmingly the norm that there should be convenient syntax for it.
> It seems to me that Ruby and ilk find a good balance here.
>
> Matt
>

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