Friday, November 20, 2009

What are the features that Perl shares with Lisp?

The author of the famous Higher-Order Perl book (it's available for free download - so no excuse for those that have not yet read it) writes:

Perl is much more like Lisp than it is like C. If you pick up a good
book about Lisp, there will be a section that describes Lisp’s good features. For example, the book Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, by Peter Norvig, includes a section titled What Makes Lisp Different? that describes seven features of Lisp. Perl shares six of these features; C shares none of them. These are big, important features, features like first-class functions, dynamic access to the symbol table, and automatic storage management.

Dear lazy web: what are the other three features?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

According to http://books.google.com/books?id=QzGuHnDhvZIC

- Built-in Support for Lists
- Automatic Storage Management
- Dynamic Typing
- First-Class Functions
- Uniform Syntax
- Interactive Environment
- Extensibility
- History

zby said...

Thanks! It seems that it is eight features in fact.