16 Feb
2018
16 Feb
'18
4:01 p.m.
On 16 Feb 2018, at 02:09, Bakul Shah <bakul(a)bitblocks.com> 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.