From: Jerry Coffin <jcoffin@...>
Date: 2008-01-31T12:34:56+09:00
Subject: Re: assert{ 2.0 } - a new kind of assertion

In article <m2ir1ba39l.fsf@spe.com>, pjm@spe.com says...

[ improved asserts for Ruby ]

>      You mean like you can easily do in Common Lisp:
> 
> http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-building-a-unit-test-framework.html
> 
> It's nice to see people making the effort to bring these primitive
> languages into the brave new world of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
> ;-)

Your code depends heavily on macros, which didn't exist in Lisp until 
1963. Even so, the early macro facilities were fairly ugly, and I'm 
pretty sure would not have handled code even vaguely similar to yours. 

The first macro facilities that resemble what you use were introduced in 
the dialects of Lisp invented for the MIT Lisp Machine project in 
roughly the mid-1970's.

That, however, was only when the language provided the facilities to 
implement your code -- I don't know of anybody having written such a 
thing until considerably later. Strangely, C had actually implemented a 
relatively complete assert facility around the time it became possible 
to do so in Lisp.

-- 
    Later,
    Jerry.

The universe is a figment of its own imagination.