Re: Why functional languages?

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#653

From: Stephen J Bevan
Date: Mon, 05 Oct 1992 23:43

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In article <farrell.718241256@coral> farrell@coral.cs.jcu.edu.au (John Farrell) writes:
     It seems to me that a syntax error in Lisp is very hard to make,
     as so long as you have the right number of brackets, everything
     is a valid program.  

Even if you take "valid" to mean the very weak guarantee that a
program is "syntactically correct" the above statement is still wrong.

To prove this, try typing random things with the "right number of
brackets" into a Lisp system with a compiler and watch it kick out all
manner of errors about the input.

bevan

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<annius.717696151@freyr> <TMB.92Sep28223555@arolla.idiap.ch> <26463@castle.ed.ac.uk> <1992Oct2.053333.20373@daffy.cs.wisc.edu> <farrell.718241256@coral>

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!charon.amdahl.com!pacbell.com!ames!agate!doc.ic.ac.uk!uknet!mucs!m1!bevan
From: bevan@cs.man.ac.uk (Stephen J Bevan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional
Subject: Re: Why functional languages?
Message-ID: <BEVAN.92Oct6004356@hippo.cs.man.ac.uk>
Date: 5 Oct 92 23:43:56 GMT
References: <annius.717696151@freyr> <TMB.92Sep28223555@arolla.idiap.ch>
 <26463@castle.ed.ac.uk> <1992Oct2.053333.20373@daffy.cs.wisc.edu>
 <farrell.718241256@coral>
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Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester
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In-reply-to: farrell@coral.cs.jcu.edu.au's message of 4 Oct 92 23:27:36 GMT

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