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Ask HN: What more is needed in Ecmascript 5 to turn it into a mainstream lisp?
6 points by whatajoke on Dec 2, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
Some features that are missing right now:

1. A proper list structure instead of arrays.

2. Macros

3. A richer numeric tower.

4. FFI

What other major changes are needed in ecmascript before the bastard child of cl comes of age, to become the new lisp? Or is there something big I am missing which makes it impossible?

John Resig has a nice overview of Ecmascript 5 at http://ejohn.org/blog/ecmascript-5-strict-mode-json-and-more/

Plus tail call optimization is coming soon to SpiderMonkey, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445363




It can't really have proper Lisp macros with its current syntax.


Atoms/symbols. Continuations.




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