News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Show HN: A notebook-style Common Lisp environment. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: A notebook-style Common Lisp environment by kazinator on Thursday July 27, 2017 @12:10AM (#14862645)
Two of Graham's Seven Primitive Operators are car and cdr. These names come from the IBM 704 implementation; they could not have existed in the theory which came before it. Since those names were used, this casts a suspicion that the theory didn't have these functions, and therefore wasn't about Lisp.

What Graham's Paper is describing is a back formation abstracted from what they got running on that IBM 704.

I doubt that the theory had quote, either, which is the gateway to "code is data". Since code-is-data is the core of Lisp, a theory without code-is-data (like the vapid nonsense that is Lambda Calculus) isn't about Lisp.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: A notebook-style Common Lisp environment by doall on Thursday July 27, 2017 @02:22AM (#14863057)
>Two of Graham's Seven Primitive Operators are car and cdr. These names come from the IBM 704 implementation;

Since the 1960 paper is after the LISP I manual and Graham's article is based on that paper the actual wordings are clearly influenced by LISP1.

>What Graham's Paper is describing is a back formation abstracted from what they got running on that IBM 704.

We viewed it as the core of LISP.

>Since code-is-data is the core of Lisp

Yes an another important part of LISP.

[ Parent | on HN ]