On 2011-10-20, at 12:32 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
Le 2011-10-20 à 10:02:00, Marc Feeley a écrit :
- We need speakers! If you are working with Scheme/Lisp or related language (e.g. JavaScript), then please consider giving a presentation. Don't be shy... we all have a story to tell. If no one comes forward, then I can prepare a talk on the Gambit REPL app for iPhone. I can also ask my students to present some of the work we are doing on the compilation of JavaScript.
How is JavaScript a related language ?
Apart from Javascript being related to Self, Self being related to Smalltalk, and Smalltalk being related to Lisp... (the link is somewhat thin)
In the 90's, when Brendan Eich was at Netscape he needed to implement a scripting language for the Netscape browser. He initially implemented a Scheme interpreter, but that morphed into JavaScript. The syntaxes are very different, but the fundamental features are there (dynamic typing, eval, closures, symbols/immutable-strings, lists/flexible-arrays).
Quoting http://javascript.crockford.com/little.html :
"JavaScript has much in common with Scheme. It is a dynamic language. It has a flexible datatype (arrays) that can easily simulate s-expressions. And most importantly, functions are lambdas."
Marc