On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 01:11:56 -0400
"Steven T. Hatton"
Garbage collection, byte compiling, running on a VM, no explicit pointers, and I'm confident other features have their origins in Emacs Lisp. If you look closely you may even discover that an object is pretty much just a specialized list. First, running in a VM is shared by nearly every interpretive language. Lisp, of course, is one of the oldest computer languages with its origin going back to the 1930s. One also must remember that Gosling was the author of the Gosling, or Carnegie-Mellon Emacs. Compiling to an intermediate language has been around for a while also. We can also look at Algol and see some Algol in Java. But, the basic language is essentially C with some fixes. Similar to C++, Java has constructors and overloading, but also lacks destructors, which are somewhat unnecessary.
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Jerry Feldman