From: Christian Neukirchen Date: 2005-04-23T19:58:24+09:00 Subject: Re: Truth, Void, Smalltalk, Lisp, and Ruby (was: Re: Ilias is Crazy -- a plea) Peter Suk writes: > On Apr 22, 2005, at 6:43 PM, Francis Hwang wrote: > >> Oh, yeah, this is a good way to stop a troll. Declare war, and then >> force everybody to pick a side. I know I come to mailing lists so I >> can engage in endless debates about who's being more rude. > > We should head off all such debates by defining a particular person to > be 'The Rudest.' I hereby volunteer to be the rudest person on this > list. This means that by official fiat, no one can be more rude than > me. Unfortunately, this is not setting the bar very high. > > On a barely related note, my Lisp-er coworker was talking with me > about inheritance in Smalltalk, Ruby, and Lisp. It turns out that in > Common Lisp Object System, the superclass of Object is T, or their > "true". In Smalltalk and Ruby, however, the superclass of Object is > "nil." No. Object doesn't have a superclass, as much as Lisp's T doesnt have a superclass. It is not nil, even if ***** may think that. Also, CLOS doesn't have "Object", it uses T for that. > Hence Lisp springs from "Truth." While Smalltalk and Ruby spring from > the "void" or "nothingness." There is an eastern/western religion > thing in there somewhere. Well, that's not entirely true... IIRC, Lisp's NIL is an own rootclass too (or something different, as you can't inherit from it..., but it is not derived from T), so you have T and NIL as "rootclasses", whereas Smalltalk and Ruby have only one, ProtoObject and Object respectively. That said, Lisp's T and NIL could stand for yin and yang or whatever you like. :-) > --Peter -- Christian Neukirchen http://chneukirchen.org