22 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
22 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
LISP
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n. [from LISt Processing language , but mythically from Lots of Irritating
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Superfluous Parentheses ] AI's mother tongue, a language based on the ideas
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of (a) variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types, and (b)
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the interpretation of code as data and vice-versa. Invented by John McCarthy
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at MIT in the late 1950s, it is actually older than any other HLL still in
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use except FORTRAN. Accordingly, it has undergone considerable adaptive
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radiation over the years; modern variants are quite different in detail from
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the original LISP 1.5. The dominant HLL among hackers until the early 1980s,
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LISP has since shared the throne with C. Its partisans claim it is the only
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language that is truly beautiful. See languages of choice. All LISP
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functions and programs are expressions that return values; this, together
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with the high memory utilization of LISPs, gave rise to Alan Perlis's famous
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quip (itself a take on an Oscar Wilde quote) that LISP programmers know the
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value of everything and the cost of nothing. One significant application for
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LISP has been as a proof by example that most newer languages, such as COBOL
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and Ada, are full of unnecessary crock s. When the Right Thing has already
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been done once, there is no justification for bogosity in newer languages.
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We've got your numbers....
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