Hacker News Reader

Comment by hekkle | Hacker News Reader

In Object Oriented programming, yes, arrays are objects and the functions are a property of another object that can perform instructions on the data of the Array Object.

Similarly in Lisp, (a list-oriented language) both functions and arrays are lists.

This article however is discussing Haskel, a Functional Language, which means they are both functions.

View on HN

> Similarly in Lisp, (a list-oriented language) both functions and arrays are lists.

In which Lisp? Try this in Common Lisp and it won't work too well:

  (let ((array (make-array 20)))
    (car array))

What is the car of an array? An array in Lisp (since Lisp 1.5 at least, I haven't read earlier documentation) is an array, and not a list. It does not behave as a list in that you cannot construct it with cons, and you cannot deconstruct it with car or cdr.

To quote John McCarthy "Since data are list structures and programs are list structures, we can manipulate programs just like data."

Yes, I know most people consider it to be a functional language, and some variants like 'common lisp' make that more explicit, but the original concept was markedly different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com