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

John Cowan wrote:
> William Tanksley scripsit:
> > 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.
> The "Early Lisp History" paper at
> http://www8.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/html/lisp/histlit1.html definitely
> shows otherwise: Lisp was designed from the beginning as a programming
> language,

This wouldn't be the first time that Wikipedia got something wrong, but
it cites Paul Graham as quoting McCarthy saying, "Steve Russell said,
look, why don't I program this eval..., and I said to him, ho, ho,
you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for
reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he
compiled the eval in my paper into IBM 704 machine code, fixing bug ,
and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was.
So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today..."

This also wouldn't be the first time that Paul Graham got something
wrong. :-) As much as I enjoyed his "On Lisp" book.

I think you're right and Wikipedia (at best) is failing to apply proper
context to Graham's quote; he was probably talking about how the
precursor to LISP (which used a different syntax) became LISP.

-Wm