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by johan_felisaz 636 days ago
The section on comp time is written in a way which makes you think that zig invented the concept. It slightly irritated the lisper in me...

Great article apart from that.

1 comments

Author here. Plagiarism is the most sincere form of flattery. I've never used lisp, but its nice to know that good ideas do, sometimes, eventually make their way into mainstream languages.
it's similar, but Lisp was rarely "batch first" or "batch only", it was already coming from 100% interactivity and then adding compilation as subsystem. So running code during compilation is the default, for example with Lisp macros, which are normal functions. The software being compiled can add arbitrary code to the compilation environment.

The traditional idea "compiled language" usually means a language designed for mostly batch compilation -> the compiler is not a part of the (potential) execution runtime. "compile time" and "run time" are not the same. In Lisp it is allowed to be the same.