Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
References: <Pine.A32.3.91.941014091539.42306C-100000@swim5.eng.sematech.org> <hbakerCxquDG.LEF@netcom.com> <Cxxwx0.1nC@rheged.dircon.co.uk> <Cy1H5H.5I8@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
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Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 16:36:08 +0000
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In article <Cy1H5H.5I8@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk "Jeff Dalton" writes:

> It is not any equivalent of POKE.  It is very like assignment in
> most languages.  You can assign to variables and to slots of
> structs and to array elements.  If conses were the one exception,
> people would complain about non-orthogonality.

Agreed. SETF allows lvalues in CL to resemble rvalues, and to add
a few bits of "syntactic sugar", like a left to right evaluation
order, and evaluating subexpressions only once. It's a lot more
effort to do this without generalised variables. Plus, you have
to remember extra function names, like ASTORE.
 
> This kind of exaggerated criticism substantially weakens your
> case, in my opinion.

It falls apart! POKE was an untyped memory "assignment". It was
a very dangerous primitive to use, unless you knew what you were
doing. I only ever saw it used for very hairy code, like stuffing
machine code into comments, or accessing memory mapped devices.
SETF should be perfectly safe, unless you consider all assignments
to be unsafe, in which case you wouldn't be using most available
languages. I have great trouble avoiding assignments in C and
Basic, and even Lisp. That could just be because of the dialects
that I use...

Martin Rodgers
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