merits of Lisp vs Python

[Paul Rubin]

"Rob Thorpe" <rthorpe at realworldtech.com> writes:
> Once you can do the above then you can phrase programs entirely in
> terms of composition of functions, which is what functional programming
> is about.
> 
> Getting good performance though is problematic without being able to
> evaluate parts at compile time.  This is why almost all functional
> languages provide that feature in some form.

I'm not aware of any special features in Haskell for that purpose, or
in Scheme until maybe with the more recent versions.  I thought the
main feature needed for functional programming besides first-class
functions was guaranteed tail call optimization.