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A comment on Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35. Parent comment

Re:Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half ... by orclev on Friday August 30, 2013 @07:07PM (#6304742)
> Lisp and related languages use Polish Notation everywhere.

> The main benefit is that (R)PN is parenthesis-free

... so what you're saying is Lisp has all those parenthesis just to troll us?

Seriously though, using PN can make implementing parsers a lot simpler as it makes the grammar less ambiguous.

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Re:Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half ... by anaphor on Friday August 30, 2013 @11:30PM (#6305654)
I don't know about less ambiguous, it can still require only single token lookahead and be context-free without any parentheses, but Lisp-ish languages are easier to parse because you have fewer productions to worry about compared to more complex languages.
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