Functional Programing: stop using recursion, cons. Use map & vectors

[Deeyana]

On Mon, 23 May 2011 00:52:07 -0700, asandroq wrote:

> On May 23, 4:29 am, Deeyana <d.awlb... at hotmail.invalid> wrote:
>>
>> You might be interested in Clojure, then. Lists are more abstracted,
>> like in Scheme, and vectors and also dictionaries/maps and sets are
>> first class citizens along side lists. And unlike Scheme, Clojure has
>> good library/host interop support. You can write real-world
>> applications in it without spontaneously combusting.
> 
>      Nonsense.

Classic unsubstantiated and erroneous claim. Nothing that I write is ever 
"nonsense".

> Several Scheme systems have excellent FFIs with more than "good library/
> host interop support".

Classic unsubstantiated and erroneous claim. Scheme does not come OOTB 
with any suitable libraries for host interop and though it can make calls 
to C libraries, doing so is awkward and involves difficulties with the 
impedance mismatch between Scheme's data structures and C's char *, void 
*, int, double, array, etc. types. To top it off, C lacks automatic 
memory management, which means you'll have to concern yourself with 
manually disposing of allocated data structures used in interop. (Or, 
worse, things will get garbage collected by the Scheme runtime that the 
Scheme code no longer references, but the C library is still using, and 
bam! SIGSEGV.)

And then you gain what, the diverse mix of platform-specific, unportable, 
sometimes-wonky C libraries?

Versus Clojure immediately granting simple, easy to use access to a large 
standard Java library that works more or less the same across a broad 
range of host platforms, as well as the rest of the JVM library 
ecosystem, which mostly has the same qualities. Clojure being designed 
for the JVM, there's much less of an impedance mismatch with Java's 
types, and the interop call syntax is easy to master and won't set your 
hair on fire.