From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Pascal J. Bourguignon" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: member returns list Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2015 02:09:44 +0200 Organization: Informatimago Message-ID: <87r3m341tj.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> References: <87bndfauey.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> <87wpw0e58f.fsf@robertthorpeconsulting.com> <87si6n822t.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> <87oaha9a64.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> <87twr1pycd.fsf@debian.uxu> <87zj0s5yc8.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> <87r3m45r7a.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> <87egi45fiw.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1442103031 31387 80.91.229.3 (13 Sep 2015 00:10:31 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2015 00:10:31 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sun Sep 13 02:10:19 2015 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Zaus6-0003s5-VN for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sun, 13 Sep 2015 02:10:19 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:34098 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Zaus6-0003uL-6n for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sat, 12 Sep 2015 20:10:18 -0400 Original-Path: usenet.stanford.edu!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 64 Original-X-Trace: individual.net mYpdvIVMDxR8a+c8PdJyTAzY6JUtDcn5nhC0r6j0GFU7FNvdpg Cancel-Lock: sha1:YWY1NGJhNmEyOWZlODE5YzljNjFjYzVmMjNiMjNiN2IyMmU2MDk4Mw== sha1:NvJWYMxkdthuP4DPNwEwG7alxmU= Face: iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAADAAAAAwAQMAAABtzGvEAAAABlBMVEUAAAD///+l2Z/dAAAA oElEQVR4nK3OsRHCMAwF0O8YQufUNIQRGIAja9CxSA55AxZgFO4coMgYrEDDQZWPIlNAjwq9 033pbOBPtbXuB6PKNBn5gZkhGa86Z4x2wE67O+06WxGD/HCOGR0deY3f9Ijwwt7rNGNf6Oac l/GuZTF1wFGKiYYHKSFAkjIo1b6sCYS1sVmFhhhahKQssRjRT90ITWUk6vvK3RsPGs+M1RuR mV+hO/VvFAAAAABJRU5ErkJggg== X-Accept-Language: fr, es, en User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux) Original-Xref: usenet.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:214900 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:107184 Archived-At: Emanuel Berg writes: > We can bet all we want but never know for sure. > Even the premise "no Lisp" is dubious. Because, why > was there a Lisp? Say, there was a Lisp because of > factors A, B, and C. Now, if we are to remove Lisp > from history and then figure out what the world of > today would have looked like, should we not only > remove Lisp, but also A, B, and C? But if we do that, > how do we know they didn't create something else, in > parallel with Lisp? Should we remove that as well? > It is like a dough, or a tree, rather than the linear > chain of events as you put it. Nothing can ever be > removed or inserted that is there or isn't there. The only reason there's LISP was John McCarthy. He started to work on LISP because Fortran and Algol designers didn't want to include language features John McCarthy deemed useful, like ternary IF and COND, or recursivity. It was plain out of Fortran scope (and remained so for a long time) and was only included into Algol by ruse. https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-into-programming-a-comedy-of-errors-3/ Notice that list processing (with XCARF and XCDRF) already existed in Fortran as FLPL (it was invented by Newell, Shaw, and Simon, not by John McCarthy). http://www.informatimago.com/articles/flpl/ And I won't say anything about the stress given to Turing Machines over Lambda Calculus, my bet again is that without John McCarthy, nobody would know about Church's work anymore. >> Similarly for the web. Without lisp and the >> interface builder (a macintosh program written in >> lisp originally, and therefore doubly dependent on >> lisp (from the >> lisp->smalltalk->parc->apple->lisa->mac and from the >> lisp->dynamic-programming->UI paths), you wouldn't >> have had nextstep where it was easy, obvious and >> trivial even, to develop html and WWW >> server/browser, given the building blocks available. >> The alternative at the time was Xanadu on the >> hypertext side, SGML on the document side, and >> gopher on the client/server side. They could have >> spend tens of years trying to mix two or three of >> those into something vaguely ressembling the www, >> without lisp and NeXTSTEP. > > I'm surprised you haven't mentioned XML. No Lisp, no > XML, right? Nope. XML comes from SGML -> HTML (dead-end), therefore SGML -> XML. Only good things can derive from Lisp. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/ “The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.” -- Carl Bass CEO Autodesk