Re: Real-life examples of lexical binding in Emacs Lisp

["Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>]

Rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

> On Saturday, May 30, 2015 at 10:24:49 PM UTC+5:30, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
>> as data, and since his student Bertrand Russel...
>
> Student Bertrand Russell?
> Now we're into alternate history methinks <wink>

I meant Steve Russell, sorry.


> To come back to my earlier request: I would really appreciate some
> early key references on Lisp as a functional language.
> [And I am guessing that you Pascal will know more about this than many others]
>
> The reason is that the more I poke into this the more interesting (juicy)
> titbits come up;
> eg Here is an interview McCarthy gave a little before he died
> http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Steele-Interviews-John-McCarthy
> In the very first question he says he learnt functional programming from Backus' Fortran!!!!!
>
> What do you think of that?!

Indeed :-)

You'll be surprised to learn that list programming was invented by Newell, A.,
Shaw, J. C., and Simon, H. A. (NSS) in the IPL programming language. 

Then an implementation in Fortran  of the list processing primitives was
implemented as  a library named FLPL:  Fortran-Compiled List Programming
Language.  In FLPL already thefamous machine instructions CAR and CDR were
made available as XCARF and XCDRF functions.

http://www.informatimago.com/articles/flpl/index.html

And since the rest of Fortran didn't match John McCarthy's expectation
for an AI programming language, he invented lisp :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Language
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/
http://www.informatimago.com/develop/lisp/com/informatimago/small-cl-pgms/aim-8/index.html
http://www.informatimago.com/develop/lisp/com/informatimago/small-cl-pgms/aim-8/aim-8.html

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
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