Re: "One-cell" language?

Excerpts from Henrik Grubbström's message of 2014-10-12 19:51:25 +0200:
> The mention of Scheme hints at that it refers to one of the differences 
> between Scheme and other dialects of LISP.
> 
> In traditional LISP dialects like InterLISP and CommonLISP symbols were 
> bound to property lists ie a symbol could hold multiple values 
> concurrently (multi-cell LISP).
> 
> See eg https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node108.html
> 
> In more modern dialects like eg Scheme symbols are bound directly to 
> values (single-cell LISP).

the lisp machine manual explains this differently:
http://common-lisp.net/project/bknr/static/lmman/fd-sym.xml

  Every symbol also has associated with it a function cell. The function cell is
  similar to the value cell...
  Maclisp does not have function cells; instead, it looks for special properties
  on the property list.

so it sounds like having a property list and multiple cells is two concepts.

and the common lisp hyperspec says:
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/t_symbol.htm

  Symbols have the following attributes. For historical reasons, these are
  sometimes referred to as cells, although the actual internal representation of
  symbols and their attributes is implementation-dependent. 

the cells are:
  Name, Package, Property list, Value, Function

i think it's not the property list, but the value/function cells that are interesting here.

a very commonly mentioned distinction between common lisp and scheme is that in
common lisp, variables and functions are two separate namespaces, while in
scheme they have a shared namespace.

in the lisp community this is commonly referred to as lisp-2 vs lisp-1.

since the term cell is not even used in the lisp community anymore, i would
suggest to update the paragraph to instead talk about the shared function/variable 
namespace, or drop it altogether since common lisp is really the only well
known language which does not have a shared function/variable namespace, so
pike is not really different from pretty much every other language out there.

greetings, martin.

-- 
eKita                   -   the online platform for your entire academic life
-- 
chief engineer                                                       eKita.co
pike programmer      pike.lysator.liu.se    caudium.net     societyserver.org
BLUG secretary                                                 beijinglug.org
foresight developer  foresightlinux.org                            realss.com
unix sysadmin
Martin Bähr          working in china        http://societyserver.org/mbaehr/