Re: Lisp is Sin

+ Bill Atkins <NOatkinwSPAM@xxxxxxx>:

| Common Lisp is an invention, no doubt about it, but I'm not sure if
| mathematical notations are "invented" or "discovered" or none of the
| above.

The boundary between invention and discovery is surely a fuzzy one.
You can say that every invention is a discovery: The discovery that a
certain solution works and works well.

When Leibniz wrote “Utile erit scribit ∫ pro omnia” back in 1675
(“It is useful to write ∫ instead of omnia” – please pardon my
Unicode), he is clearly expressing the discovery of the usefulness of
a shorter notation for the integral, while at the same time inventing
the particular symbol we are using today.

I think it may be useful to think of an invention as more of a
discovery if it is necessary or very much better suited than any
alternative to the task at hand. Ever since formal grammars were
first used to describe Algol, it has been natural to think of
programming languages more in terms of parse trees than the actual
string of characters used to express a program. So what is more
likely, if you wish to be able to express code as data within the
language, to make the syntax so that the correspondence between
program text and parse trees is as close to trivial as you can get?
It seems to me that sexprs is a very obvious way to achieve that, and
experience with other attempts to do the same thing (XML, say)
indicates that sexprs is really darned close to optimal. So I would
agree that at least the syntax of Lisp seems discovered. (But many
implementation details, like the use of round parentheses, dotted
lists, etc., clearly fall into the "invented" category, but then of
course these details are much less interesting, in the same way that
the specific shape of the integral sign is not terribly significant.)

--
* Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- Debating gives most of us much more psychological satisfaction
than thinking does: but it deprives us of whatever chance there is
of getting closer to the truth. -- C.P. Snow
.

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