From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2002-09-20T17:50:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Thoughts on improving usage of Regexp#match

Nikodemus Siivola wrote:
>>>I think that #2 in your list above is a sign of Perl envy where Perl has
>>>no notion of nil vs empty string (which I brought up on this list a
>>
>>Na, it's lisp-envy. Nil and false should be indistinguishable from an empty
>>list.
> 
> 
> To extend on this & the related auto-vivification issues: seems to me that
> functionality of this kind is one of the few things you lose in OO, when
> all types -- including user defined ones -- stand on equal footing.

That's a wonderful thing about Ruby. Arguably, Perl is slightly better 
than Ruby for string processing, and Lisp edges out Ruby for list 
processing. But Ruby is much better than Perl for working with lists or 
any complex data structures, and Ruby is easier to use than Lisp for 
string processing.

Which isn't to say I don't miss some things from lisp, like macros.