Re: Why don't people like lisp?

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

If a function like “max” or “min” is defined to return a number,

They are defined to return the larger or smaller of two members of any
datatype with an order relation, e.g. lexicographic order on strings.
There is no infinity for strings.  There's also none for integers, for
that matter.

then it makes sense that the maximum of an empty list should be -∞,

Meh, it's just undefined.  Otherwise you can't tell whether the list is
empty or actually contains -∞ as a value.

and a lot of special cases no longer become special.

More likely a lot of errors go undetected.  Better to handle the special
cases in some sane way, if they can happen in the program and need
handling.