From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2001-01-20T06:57:05+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:9569] Re: 101 Misconceptions About Dynamic Languages

On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, Peter Wood wrote:
> If you are suggesting that Lisp *is* FP, you are not familiar with
> Lisp.  Lisp can support FP as well as procedural, OO etc, etc ....
> Add anything you choose ;-)  You might be thinking of Scheme.

But Scheme and ML also support the "styles"/"paradigms" you are listing; 
they support the notion of a timeline and mutability and procedures, and
optionally objects.

I say that if LISP is not functional programming, then FORTRAN is not
imperative programming. In the good old days, the daughter of Lord Byron
invented machine language. That was real imperative programming. So is
assembly language. Everything starting with FORTRAN has been polluted
by those things called "expressions" and "return values".

Using some relativity and the notion of "most encouraged style", you can
say that LISP is functional and FORTRAN is imperative.

matju