On Sun, 13 Feb 2005, Michael Walter wrote:

> Your argument regarding Lisp and O'caml ignores the fact that
> programming languages are to a large part about syntax - for obviously
> valid reasons like accessability, maintainability, expressiveness,
> etc.
> 
> I feel I've mentioned that so many times it should be in some FAQ ;o)

With a parser generator (take zebu, for example) and, say,
SET-DISPATCH-MACRO-CHARACTER, I just as well can give you any syntax you 
want on top of lisp. But I think you understand if I don't post code 
that explicitly demonstrates how to do that now.

So, syntax just as well is "nothing more than a library". Once the 
mechanics is there, I can easily place any arbitrary notation on top of 
that. If you want, I can make my pattern matching in lisp look exactly 
like ocaml pattern matching.

-- 
regards,               tf@cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de              (o_
 Thomas Fischbacher -  http://www.cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~tf  //\
(lambda (n) ((lambda (p q r) (p p q r)) (lambda (g x y)           V_/_
(if (= x 0) y (g g (- x 1) (* x y)))) n 1))                  (Debian GNU)