Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uknet!festival!edcogsci!usenet
From: tfb@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Tim Bradshaw)
Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta -
In-Reply-To: Erik Naggum's message of 16 Oct 1994 12:44:39 UT
Message-ID: <TFB.94Oct19090509@burns.cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Sender: usenet@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (C News Software)
Nntp-Posting-Host: burns
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh
References: <37p0uq$2gn@omnifest.uwm.edu> <19941016T124439Z.enag@naggum.no>
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 1994 08:05:09 GMT
Lines: 22

* Erik Naggum wrote:
> |   LISP, itself, was never meant to be a purely bracketed language.  That
> |   syntax was designed as a holdover until the language could be complete
> |   -- a first generation in a bootstrapping process.  It's just that the
> |   McCarthy never got around to finishing his project.  Undoubtedly, part
> |   of the reason was that Context Free Grammars were hardly even known
> |   back then.

> could you provide some references for this history lesson?  I'd like to
> update my insufficient view on this one.

It is I think basically true.  The paper by Steele & Gabriel (`History
of Lisp' which is at least at
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/lang/lisp/doc/history/evo_lisp.pgz)
says pretty much this: there was intended to be a different representation for
lisp programs (and maybe sexps were for data?) but then someone wrote
an interpreter using the standard syntax and it stuck.

Of course that doesn't alter the fact that Lisp is way easier to type
for me than languages with spot plague like C.

--tim
