Re: [stack] Advantages of cat, joy ..?

Don Groves wrote:
> I thought those assembly language hackers were the early Lispers.

Lisp, like APL, was originally created as a tool for thought, not for
computers. car and cdr could not have been in the original at all; they
were an artifact of the first implementation.

APL was actually used for a while before it was ever implemented on a
computer. After it had been used a while for business process
improvement, the first APL compiler was built by assigning graduate
students who did not know APL to translate APL expressions into machine
code; the intent was to test whether APL was clearer than other
notations, including natural language. The result was, according to the
person who carried out the experiment, a success; bugs were much rarer
and the instructor had to spend much less time explaining than when the
task was explained in natural language.

This experiment tells us a lot about APL, natural languages,
experimenters, and the proper care and feeding of graduate students.

> don

-Wm