Talk:Lisp (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 03:02, 11 June 2025

Revision as of 03:03, 11 June 2025

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: Yes, I thought I had edited this article to make this plain, but looking again I think the edit I made was on [[Scheme (programming language)]], where I wrote:

:: ''[[Alonzo Church]]'s mathematical notation, the lambda calculus, has inspired Lisp's use of "lambda" as a keyword for introducing a procedure, as well as influencing the development of [[functional programming]] techniques involving the use of [[higher-order function]]s in Lisp. But early Lisps were not suitable expressions of the lambda calculus because of their treatment of [[Free variables and bound variables|free variables]].

:: ''The introduction of lexical scope resolved the problem by making an equivalence between some forms of lambda notation and their practical expression in a working programming language. Sussman and Steele showed that the new language could be used to elegantly derive all the imperative and declarative semantics of other programming languages including ALGOL and [[Fortran]], and the dynamic scope of other Lisps, by using lambda expressions not as simple procedure instantiations but as "control structures and environment modifiers." They introduced [[continuation-passing style]] along with their first description of Scheme in the first of the Lambda Papers, and in subsequent papers they proceeded to demonstrate the raw power of this practical use of lambda calculus.''