So what about RPN? What about Forth and Postscript? Just as simple... just as terse... just as efficient... just as general.
And, for me, just as unreadable.
All RPN does is replace the easy to get right parenthesis with difficult to get right newline characters.
And I include myself in this.
Remember that for a lot of ordinary people, school algebra is almost impossible to follow and is the reason they stop studying maths as soon as they can. And that is simple infix notation.
Riddle me this then: When editing code full of parentheticals, why do devs find it helpful that IDEs can find and highlight the matching opening/closing parenthesis automatically? I mean, based on your logic, parenthesis just don't make things any easier, right? I'll leave the topic of "indentation" completely off the table too, because a single riddle is enough.
Me personally? I dislike them both. I find them both unreadable.
But both are compact and efficient... just really difficult.
You are trying to put words in my mouth that are not there. That is very rude. Do not do that, ever.
But also, as you have been throughout this thread, you are wrong.
Think about it: the entire class of error of mismatched stack height doesn't exist in Lisps.
There could be an operand stack, if the Lisp is translated to a stack-based byte code; but it's managed so the programmer isn't concerned about it.
((a b +) (a b) defun)
(((list pop) print) list while)But seriously, yeah computers are naturally 'Stack Machines' [almost] always, where they need the arguments pushed onto a stack before the 'verb' is executed.
So if we translate that sequence to language, stating the operands before the operation does follow the non-negotiable evaluation data flow.
That was unclear given you kept calling out English, and not natural or human language more broadly in the rest of your comment. But I'll go with it.
> all my words in the literal sense, everything I said is still literally true.
No, they aren't. You need to make a stronger case than "Because I declared it axiomatically true".
+ has become part of nearly every language already, what's the value of picking one word (add) from one language (English) to replace it? Or to be more generous to say that every language should substitute for + whatever their language's word is. Now they can't communicate without a translator. Or, they could just use + as has been done for centuries. Why make things harder on ourselves?