From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-08-09T13:56:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Language chatter

Chad Perrin wrote:
> (Larry Wall has, himself, said he doesn't
> know all of Perl).
>   
At one point, I pretty much knew "all of Lisp 1.5". When I had an 
opportunity to do some (Macintosh) Common Lisp programming two summers 
ago, I discovered that, although a lot of "new stuff" had been tacked 
on, Lisp 1.5 still works!! I don't think K&R C "still works", I don't 
think FORTRAN I "still works", although FORTRAN IV probably does. And I 
know one piece of Perl 4 that stopped working somewhere in the 5.6 -- 
5.8 range -- byte semantics. :) The part of Perl that Larry Wall does 
know may not "still work". :)
> Lisp, in my understanding, achieves greater flexibility than Perl by
> making it absurdly easy to arbitrarily generate the defaults that best
> suit the task at hand.  Ruby, meanwhile, is a great compromise between
> all three of those approaches: there are default abstractions that are
> clearly defined, and it encourages the programmer to use them for
> solving problems, but it makes it possible to use a plethora of other
> abstractions that are nondefault and still available to the programmer.
> When that's not enough, it provides macros for building your own
> defaults from "scratch" with notable ease.
>   
With all of the rantings of the Lispniks about how wonderful Lisp macros 
are, I've actually never seen what Rubyists refer to as "macros". Where 
could I find that -- Ruby constructs called "macros" by Ruby programmers?