From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: tfb@tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw) Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 10:01:36 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Niklaus Wirth! In-Reply-To: <20180216020944.AF0ED156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> References: <20180216020944.AF0ED156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> Message-ID: <98310912-009A-438C-B7C6-82C8DF25621B@tfeb.org> On 16 Feb 2018, at 02:09, Bakul Shah wrote: > > Scheme's lexical scope and block structure came from Algol. > The rest from Lisp. The joke was that the shortest and longest > language specs were of lisp dialects. The C++ spec may be > longer now. I don't think this is true in any meaningful sense. There are famous plays on words which relate Scheme to Algol (The Scheme specifications are 'revised^n reports on the algorithmic language scheme', and I think lexical scope in Lisps probably originated with the Scheme people, but Scheme was the first standard language, anywhere, which took lexical scope seriously: in particular it was the first standard language with first-class continuations. (I'm saying 'standard language' because I'm sure there were research prototype implementations.). The Common Lisp spec was very long at the time -- I think it was 1100 pages. It was mostly as long as it was because they decided not to split out what other languages would call parts of the standard library. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: