Fall 1958, from John
McCarthy's memoir, the origin of many good things
The occasion of
dredging this up was a happy memory
connected to oldSCO from the late 80's.
The company where I
worked had a machine running SCO XENIX with a LISP
implementation, being used for a rule-based program for some
law enforcement
application.
Several of us went through the LISP tutorial, which I found
particularly enjoyable for its interactive presentation of
the bootstrapping
nature of a LISP interpreter.
Many years later (yesterday) I had occasion to
use one of
the LISP primitives, cons (add an entry to the
beginning of
a list), in a snippet of
Maxima (CAS) code.
This is handy because Maxima is
mainly written in LISP, and thus LISP can be
called more or
less immediately from the symbolic algebra environment to
perform new operations.
--- Rosser's trick: "For every proof of me,
there is a shorter proof of my negation". [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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