At 12:09 PM 12/20/2009, Richard Newman wrote: >[...] >I think most of the active Clojure community ranges from not caring to >genuinely liking s-expression notation,
And all the way to disliking the replacement of many parens with square brackets in the syntax. That's why I, a pendant who prior to now has religiously referred to this family of languages as LISPs (LISt Processing), calls Clojure the first Lisp. >[...] > >The same goes for infix math; lots of beginners start writing an infix >math library, and by the time they're done they've become familiar >with prefix notation and no longer want their new library. This is a telling point. No such library has to my (limited) knowledge ever become popular, and you would think this is where the idea would get the most traction. >[...] > >Back on the topic: McCarthy originally intended Lisp to have an Algol- >ish syntax (m-expressions), but nobody ever finished the work because >they found s-expressions to be sufficient: > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression > >> The project of defining M-expressions precisely and compiling them >> or at least translating them into S-expressions was neither >> finalized nor explicitly abandoned. It just receded into the >> indefinite future, and a new generation of programmers appeared who >> preferred internal notation to any FORTRAN-like or ALGOL-like >> notation that could be devised. >> — John McCarthy[1], History of Lisp > >I think a lot of people would benefit from learning the lessons of >history. Indeed. Although I think the above ends during the punched card FORTRAN subroutine period of LISP. To draw in Sean Devlin's excellent point about REPLs, as I remember, not long after this period someone realized you could add read and print to eval and get an interpreter. One general principle I've noted is that when you have a design that solves problems you didn't know you had, you should pay attention. - Harold -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
