ignore this one

From Paulson's ML for the Working Programmer:

The product of a list of integers can be computed like this:

fun prod ns = if null ns then 1 else (hd ns) * (prod (tl ns));

If you prefer this version of prod, you might as well give up ML for Lisp. For added clarity, Lisp primitives have names like CAR and CDR. Normal people find pattern-matching more readable than hd and tl.

*laughs* I guess I'd better give up ML for LISP, then, because that's exactly how I'd do it. I'm sure that ML is, uh, lovely when you get to know it (perhaps analogous to "I'm sure that deep down inside, he's a really nice guy..."), but it just feels pretentious, as a language. The Paulson text really doesn't help.

And it's not that it's totally debilitating, trying to code in it, anymore... it's just that it's incredibly slow going, and the documentation sucks. And this is me whining that I could whip out the cs4240 project in LISP in like a quarter of the time, if that.

Nyip, off to go do things...

I was surprised...

... at how politely the street-preachers ("HELL IS HOT!!") out near the Skiles walkway listened to me while I was explaining to them why their idea of Divine Justice and Free Will and an all-powerful, unsurprisable God with total foreknowledge is internally inconsistent.

I wasn't surprised that they weren't really listening, so much, and then proceeded to discuss about how much joy they've found in Jesus Christ and how the wrath of God hangs over our heads, in his great mercy, amen. (also, their idea of predestination is very strange indeed -- we need to get some learned Calvinists on this problem...)