Subject: Re: Why Arc isn't especially OO From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 21:14:05 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3217698843229235@naggum.net> * Alexander Kjeldaas <astor@fast.no> | I have not considered handling resourcing, pooling objects etc. because | they would be engineering tricks to work around the GC, and if done | extensively to reduce consing, would lead to the kinds of bugs that GC is | there to avoid in the first place. This is an incredibly unwarranted assumption. Do you still think in C++ when you are discussing memory management in Common Lisp? It is so wrong to think of these techniques as "engineering tricks" and especially to do so "to work around the GC". The same condescending comments would apply to nreverse and other non-consing functions. There is a difference between being aware of and trying to prevent wanton waste and thinking that whoever cleans up after you has problems so you had better not drop any garbage around. Good programmers are concerned about wanton waste or any resource, and not because they "work around" CPU speeds or GC, but because they are good practitioners of the art of programming. Reading this discussion sounds just like a documentary I saw the other day on the coral reefs of Australia. The narrator spoke French with mostly English words and usually English pronunciation like most French do, but retained French idioms, choice of latinate words, and where the words looked too much like a French word, chose French pronunciation, etc, basically largely unintelligible unless one knows what the French would have meant had it actually been in French. In other words, I think you are speaking Common Lisp with _very_ heavy accent. That does not mean that a lot of the issues you raise are invalid or uninteresting, only that they look very much like someone's C++ perspective and may not actually be relevant to Common Lisp. /// -- The past is not more important than the future, despite what your culture has taught you. Your future observations, conclusions, and beliefs are more important to you than those in your past ever will be. The world is changing so fast the balance between the past and the future has shifted.