Steven D'Aprano wrote:
It has always perplexed me that Lisp's prefix notation is held up as the /sine qua non/ of elegance and power, while Forth is ignored if not ridiculed.
The reason Lisp is easier to program in than Forth is not because of prefix vs. postfix. It's because in Lisp a function call is syntactically grouped together with its arguments, whereas in Forth it's not. Forth requires you to mentally simulate the stack to figure out what's operating on what. A language that was just like Forth except that it used prefix rather than postfix would be just as hard to reason about. Likewise, a postfix version of Lisp would be just as easy.
Perhaps it is because Lisp started as an academic language in the computer science department ... while Forth was merely a practical language invented to control telescopes,
No, it's because Lisp has just enough structure, and Forth has too little. If Forth had come out of a computer science department and Lisp had been invented by an astronomer, Lisp would still be the easier language to use. -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
