Subject: Re: Pass by reference From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: 18 Nov 2000 05:14:20 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3183513260645961@naggum.net> * Joe Marshall <jrm@content-integrity.com> | A simple example may make it easier to understand the concept where a | more realistic example may hide the concept in a jumble of irrelevant | detail. I think simple examples are counter-productive because they do not show the _normal_ complexity of the situation in which something makes sense. That's why "hello, world" programs are so fantastically useless. We have a long tradition of suffering from people who learned Lisp as an example of something rather trivial that never explained why Lisp was a good choice -- anything else would be a good choice, too -- nor when Lisp would be a good choice. | But isn't that what modern languages such as Java do? Yeah, that's the "misery loves company" argument for doing something painful. #:Erik -- ALGORITHM: a procedure for solving a mathematical problem in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation. ALGOREISM: a procedure for solving an electoral problem in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation.