On Thu, Feb 22, 2001 at 07:14:50PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
practice than it is in theory. In fact, Python has rather forced me to question whether "No separation between code and data" was as important a component of LISP's supernal wonderfulness as I believed when I was a fully fervent member of the cult.
I think it is. Currently I'm reading Steven Tanimoto's introductory AI book in a doomed-from-the-start attempt to learn about rule-based systems, and along the way am thinking about how I'd do similar tasks in Python. The problem is that, for applying pattern matching to data structures, Python has no good equivalent of Lisp's (pattern-match data '((? X) 1 2)). [1] Perhaps this is more a benefit of Lisp's simple syntax than the "no separation between code and data" priniciple. In Python you could write some sort of specialized parser, of course, but that's really a distraction from the primary AI task of writing a really bitchin' Eliza program (or whatever). --amk [1] Which would match any list whose 2nd and 3rd elements are (1 2), and bind the first element to X somehow.