Re: the necessity of Lisp's Objects?

> From: Xah Lee <x...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Jon Harrop wrote ... Jon, you are just picking bones.

I side with Jon on this. Not sup****ting recursion is a *killer* in
any modern programming language. It's just not acceptable to
silently not have it working, then upon discovery simply disallow
it!! It wouldn't even have been acceptable if it had been openly
and honestly disallowed from the start, although at least that
would have been less despicable.

> I don't know whether your claims are true. But i assume they are.
> These are bugs, jon. Common Lisp has bugs, Haskell has bugs, i
> see them discussed in newsgroup posts. Perl has bugs. Javascript
> has bugs. Mathematica has bugs. PHP has bugs. Python has bugs. I
> knew concrete examples of these personally.

There are degrees of bugs:
- Mathematica is totally missing recursion. It's a total loser.
- CMUCL (on FreeBSD Unix) has only two or three bugs I ever discovered:
  - (sleep <noninteger.geq.1>) doesn't sleep at all. It was
     simple for me to write a patch to obtain correct behaviour:
     (defun cl-sleep (sec)
       (cond ((and (not (integerp sec)) (>= sec 1.0))
              (multiple-value-bind (int frac) (floor sec)
                (sleep int) (sleep frac)))
             (t (sleep sec))))
  - FORMAT with ~newline to ignore until first non-white on next
     line didn't work, so I wrote an ugly workaround to delete all
     such ~newline+white sequences before passing the format
     string, but that was fixed in new version a few years ago so I
     can call FORMAT directly now.
  - format strings in [C]ERROR had the same problem, fixed at the same
time
- Both XLisp and PowerLisp are so grossly deficient and/or broken
   that they aren't worth using. I have't yet found a free CL for
   Macintosh that's really usable.
- PHP doesn't have integers, only floats. That seems to me an awful
deficiency.
- I haven't used Perl or JavaScript enough to know how serious
   their bugs may be. Would somebody offer a brief ballpark
   estimate+example?

> Maybe if you kissed people's ass in your attitudes, they might
> sell your package by now. This is the key to business Jon.

That may be a fact of the business world, but that's no way to
write software now in the days of InterNet. Better to do it the
Amazon.com way of book/product reviews or newsgroup equivalent.
What's the best newsgroup for discussing the relative merits of
computer-mathematics systems? comp.soft-sys.math isn't active.