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by TeMPOraL 4130 days ago
So you think we're better off just giving up on a perfectly good reason for these naming conventions and call "princ" "print" just because some poor language without the concept of Read-Eval-Print Loop named its function that way and then everyone else blindly followed?

Seriously, Lisp has long history and had half the "new amazing features of today" 30 years ago. There is a rationale for naming conventions. Just because you're free to call a string-spitting function "print" in Ruby or Pascal or whatever doesn't mean you can do it in a language with a proper REPL.
2 comments
Morgawr 4130 days ago
Alternative to 'princ' doesn't have to be 'print', it could be any of 'print-out' 'output' 'put' 'write' 'write-output', and that's just off the top of my head (yes, several of these can be ambiguous and might have different meanings, but still better than 'princ').

Just because CL has a long history, it doesn't mean that everything about it has to be correct. Otherwise why start a project of CL remodernization in the first place?

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chrisduesing 4130 days ago
Yes. Of course I wouldn't characterize it as blindly following so much as being able to rationally step back with some perspective and identify some trends as positive.

Lisps are a beautiful and powerful family of languages, but you are conflating the implementation with the idea. The names of functions from 30 years ago are not what makes Lisp special.

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