Re: the necessity of Lisp's Objects?

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:23:32 GMT, "David Formosa (aka ? the Platypus)"
<dformosa@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 10:26:42 +0000, Jon Harrop <usenet@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>wrote: 
>
>[...]
>
>> Mathematica does sup****t recursion but its Compile function (that
compiles
>> to an interpreted bytecode) does not sup****t recursive anonymous
functions.
>>
>> Actually, I can't think of any other languages that sup****t recursive
>> anonymous functions anyway: none of Lisp, Scheme, SML, OCaml, F# and
>> Haskell do AFAIK.
>
>You can do anonymous recusion in Lisp and Scheme via letrec.  Any
>language where you can implement the Y-combinator you can get
>anonymous recursion.

Lisp doesn't have letrec - you use labels instead.  And technically
the functions are not anonymous because the forms require you to bind
or name them.  A function has to be named or symbol bound to be
recursive - else no way to refer to itself.  Ditto in most other
languages that sup****t the equivalent of lambda.

I don't know Mathematica so I'm not sure what John really meant by
"recursive anonymous".  I can imagine having special syntax to
recursively call the current function without specifying it by name
.... but it would be senseless fluff and I've never seen it done.

George
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