Re: Growing a data type?

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 08:36:12 -0700, Ali wrote:

I think Guy Steele has more interesting things in mind than
reimplementing strings.

I'm not Guy Steele, I have boring things in mind such as seeing if this
theme can be extended across to the area of data types.

Why should I care? Its not interesting to you, but in case you've missed
the fact, I'll tell you:
Programs are pretty pointless without a concept of data. That is why I
find the question both interesting and important.

Indeed. But if you have basic data types (numbers, arrays, structs,
lists) that all major languages possess nowadays, you can always
implement new data types by combining them. In this sense your question
is trivial - if Lisp didn't have strings, there would be a zillion ways
to implement them as sequences of characters, index->character has
tables, or whatever (some of course make more sense than others). The
same applies to other general languages.

The other aspect is providing a read syntax, which is not that important
anyhow for new data types, but milanj answered this questions for you.

I may have misread your post, but I see it as both a) condescending, and
b) lacking anything interesting in itself.

Although I don't mind either of those properties on their own, when
combined, a magical process occurs in my brain where I start thinking
less of you, no matter how good a Lisp hacker you are.

And no, my question wasn't the best in the world, it was merely aimed at
producing some interesting conversation.

No, you were asking about something trivial that you could have found out
for yourself easily.

Please understand that for some reason c.l.l attracts a whole bunch of
clowns (I am not implying that you are one of them) who have no desire to
program Lisp, just keep asking questions or emitting utterances they
think are profound, so people reading this NG are a bit tired of things
like that.

HTH,

Tamas
.

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