Is Dylan a LISP?

carlgay

I'm a big fan of Dylan. I'm one of less than 10 current Dylan hackers. But I myself have come to the conclusion that it isn't really a LISP. Even though it's very heavily influenced by Scheme and CLOS, I think that not having s-expression syntax disqualifies it from being a member of the LISP family.

The creators of this forum have included it (which is great!), so at least they must consider it a LISP.

What do you think?

khinsen

I don't really care about defining LISP very precisely. Dylan lives in the same design space, differing from the rest of LISP in one important aspect: syntax. That makes it an interesting language for discussing here, no matter how it's classified.

amoroso

It's worth reminding that early, traditional Lisp dialects sometimes also supported Algol-like infix syntaxes in addition to s-exps. For example, CLISP of Interlisp and CGOL(?) of Maclisp.

marcoxa

Is Julia a Lisp?

khinsen

If Dylan is a Lisp, then Julia also is a Lisp.

marcoxa

khinsen Julia and Dylan are Common Lisp in a drag :) :) :)

ggxx

marcoxa I wish there were a more lispy version of Julia. I'd enjoy using it a lot more. It was Julia that introduced me to the joy of multimethods. When I learned that this feature came from Common Lisp, that led me to eventually pick up Common Lisp, too.