Re: some personal rambling on java the lang

From:
ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram)
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.lisp
Date:
20 Oct 2010 00:10:30 GMT
Message-ID:
<Scheme-20101020020358@ram.dialup.fu-berlin.de>
Joshua Maurice <joshuamaurice@gmail.com> writes:

The semantics of Java and the semantics of Lisp
and Scheme are worlds apart.


  LISP was the first language with a garbage collector, now
  Java also has a GC, while C++ does not have a GC. But this
  is only one aspect. However, in Java, one can partially
  emulate the LISP style, where functions (like CONS) return
  complex entities (dotted pairs) allocated at runtime which
  might be linked and passed around in complex ways. In C++,
  this is much more difficult, because there is no garbage
  collector.

  Lisp and Scheme are not pure functional languages, but allow
  some functional programming, possibly not to the extend of
  Haskell. Lisp also allows for a more OO or procedural style.

  There is some overlapping between OOP and FP, because FP is
  based on functions-as-values (reification of functions)
  which can also be done in OOP via functions-as-objects
  (sometimes called ?functors? in C++).

  Maybe I confounded Java with JavaScript in this
  regard? For JavaScript, Wikipedia says:

      ?JavaScript also has many functional features
      based on the Scheme language.?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript

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