Goto indeed! See the famous "Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO," but Guy Steele (who, incidentally, is at Sun nowadays). Google it! A lot of people would take your comment as a compliment of closures, not as a dis.

Posted by Nico on September 05, 2006 at 09:12 PM IST #

Hi Nico, Thanks for that great paper (and related ones from one of those sites). I went through the "Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO" and if I am not wrong , isn't it not selling proc calls over goto ? I am not doubting the power and expressiveness of goto if used well (just like I dont doubt the efficieny and power of assembly) - but it does lead to sphagetti code when used by most people. Programmers who can use it well , do - but introducing goto (or similar) as the preferred programming construct for a new idiom might be a step backwards right ? Ofcourse , it might just have been that I misinterpreted the intent:-) Mridul

Posted by Mridul on September 05, 2006 at 10:31 PM IST #

The topic is long, and a conversation over blog comments isn't going to cut it, but basically given closures you can create amazing flow control operators, including things like catch/throw, all the loops you see in traditional Algol-family languages, Prolog-like (or Icon!) backtracking (think regular expressions) and more. I highly recommend these books if you're interested: "LISP In Small Pieces" (get it? it's recursive) by Christian Queinnec, and "On Lisp" and "ANSI Common Lisp," both by Paul Graham. On Lisp is out of print, but you can download it and Graham's other books from Graham's web site.

Posted by Nico on September 06, 2006 at 01:58 AM IST #