There's a talk Doug McIllroy gave where he joked about how he
basically invented (or rather, discovered) recursion because someone
said ``Hey, what would happen if we made a FORTRAN routine call
itself?'' IIRC he had to tinker with the compiler to get it to accept
the idea, and at first, no one realized what it would be good for.
Are you implying Doug McIlroy hadn't been taught about (and inevitably
occupied by) Church-Turing Thesis or even before that Ackermann function
and had to wait to be inspired by a comment in passing about FORTRAN to
realize the importance of recursion?! This was a rhetorical question, of
course.
--On Sunday, September 06, 2009 00:23 -0400 "J.R. Mauro"
<jrm8...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 2:26 PM, erik quanstrom <quans...@quanstro.net>
wrote:
i'm not a lisp fan. but it's discouraging to see
such lack of substance as the following (collected
from a few posts):
Oh, yay, a Xah Lee quote, he's surely a trusted source on all things
Lisp. Didja read his page about hiring a prostitute in Las Vegas? Or
the one about how he lives in a car in the Bay Area because he's too
crazy to get hired?
surely an ad hominum attack like this neither furthers an
argument nor informs anyone.
I forgot this: Graham basically accuses programmers who don't find LISP
as attractive (or powerful, as he puts it) as he does of living on lower
planes of existence from which the "heavens above" of functional (or
only LISP) programming seem incomprehensible. He writes/speaks
persuasively, he's a successful businessman, but is he also an honest
debater?
and here i don't see an argument at all.
I just read in Wikipedia that, "Lisp's original conditional operator,
cond, is the precursor to later if-then-else structures," without any
citations. Assuming that to be true conditional branching is a
fundamental element of control flow and it has existed in machine
languages ever since early days. There's really very little to brag
about it.
i'd love to argue this factually, but my knowledge isn't
that extensive. i think you'll find in the wiki entry for
Computer that much of what we take for granted today
was not obvious at the time. stored program computers
with branching didn't come along until about 1948
(einiac). i hope someone will fill in the gaps here.
i think it's worth appreciating how great these early
discoveries were.
There's a talk Doug McIllroy gave where he joked about how he
basically invented (or rather, discovered) recursion because someone
said ``Hey, what would happen if we made a FORTRAN routine call
itself?'' IIRC he had to tinker with the compiler to get it to accept
the idea, and at first, no one realized what it would be good for.
in the same vein, i don't know anything much about file
systems that i didn't steal from ken thompson.
- erik
