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Static typing

John Atwood jatwood at cvpjaws03.dhcp.cv.hp.com
Mon Oct 27 13:10:57 EST 2003 
Pascal Costanza  <costanza at web.de> wrote:
>John Atwood wrote:
>> Pascal Costanza  <costanza at web.de> wrote:
>>>No, you definitely can do a lot of things with macros in Lisp that are 
>>>impossible to do in other languages. There are papers that show this 
>>>convincingly. Try 
>>>ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-453.pdf for a 
>>>start. Then continue, for example, with some articles on Paul Graham's 
>>>website, or download and read his book "On Lisp".
>> 
>> That's a great paper; however, see Steele's later work:
>> 	http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/steele94building.html
>
>Yes, I have read that paper. If you want to work with monads, you 
>probably want a static type system.
>
>(And I think he still likes Scheme and Lisp. ;)


Perhaps, but the paper shows convincingly that statically typed languages 
can do a lot of things that Lispers use macros for. Work in 
meta-programming, aka mult-stage programming, shows how to more finely 
control the power of macros, reflection, etc. See, e.g.:
	http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/sheard00accomplishments.html
	http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/taha99multistage.html

John
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