[HN Gopher] An Algebraic Language for the Manipulation of Symbol...
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An Algebraic Language for the Manipulation of Symbolic Expressions
(1958) [pdf]
Author : swatson741
Score : 72 points
Date : 2025-11-08 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org)
| leoc wrote:
| Reposting my now very old comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10502434 :
|
| > Herbert Stoyan's historical work on early Lisp
| http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2010/07/29/185/
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050617031004/http://www8.infor...
| is probably worth reading if one is seriously interested. (I
| haven't read much of it myself yet.) McCarthy praised Stoyan's
| work as better than his own 1979 HOPL paper ( http://www-
| formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html ): "Stoyan's
| reading of the early LISP documents gives a more accurate picture
| than my own memories turned out to have given." http://www-
| formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/
|
| > (As a side-note, I'm pretty sure that the broken, Wayback-
| beating link to "Lisp references according to Miller" on
| McCarthy's page is to this http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-
| site/alu/table/Lisp-Hist... document by Kent Pitman and Brad
| Miller (see http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-
| site/alu/table/history.h... ).)
|
| From 2015-2018, "The Mysteries of Lisp -- I: The Way to
| S-expression Lisp" by Hong-Yi Dai
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07375 (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31153702 )
|
| > Despite its old age, Lisp remains mysterious to many of its
| admirers. The mysteries on one hand fascinate the language, on
| the other hand also obscure it. Following Stoyan but paying
| attention to what he has neglected or omitted, in this first
| essay of a series intended to unravel these mysteries, we trace
| the development of Lisp back to its origin, revealing how the
| language has evolved into its nowadays look and feel. The
| insights thus gained will not only enhance existent understanding
| of the language but also inspires further improvement of it.
| MycroftJones wrote:
| I like how the McCarthy's paper maps the fundamental operations
| to machine instructions and memory model. It's like something
| you can actually implement.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Besides this first report (AIM-001), some of the reports
| following it in the next months are at least as important, by
| introducing other essential features of LISP and of many later
| languages:
|
| 1958-10: AIM-003 (the special form "maplist", i.e. a kind of
| "forall" iteration)
|
| 1958-10: AIM-004 (anonymous function definitions using "lambda";
| the special form "select", which already at that early date had
| better syntax and semantics than the "switch" or "case"
| statements of later languages; the special form "search")
|
| 1959-03-13: AIM-008 (the special form "quote"; the special form
| "label", for defining anonymous recursive functions; also the
| special forms "and" and "or", a.k.a. McCarthy AND and McCarthy
| OR, inherited by many languages, including C)
| kant2002 wrote:
| Does anybody attempt to re-implment each variant of pre-LISP
| described in these reports? Even if it just for
| educational/historical purposes?
| anthk wrote:
| https://t3x.org/lispxv/index.html
| anthk wrote:
| Subset of Lisp 1.5 https://t3x.org/lispxv/index.html
| drob518 wrote:
| If you ever wondered why Lisp has CAR and CDR, this explains it.
| kazinator wrote:
| It doesn't fully explain it, but drops some hints:
|
| "The other main advantage of the algebraic notation for list
| structure processing was first noticed by Gelernter."
|
| That's one of the authors of the Fortran-compiled List-
| processing Language (FLPL) in which thef unctions XCARF and
| XCDRF were introduced.
|
| MacCarthy drops a hint that _he_ actually had something to do
| with Gelernter 's work and his choices:
|
| "Algebraic notation for list processing is not used by
| Net'Jell, Simon and Shaw, pelhaps beaause to do so is most
| convenient when a compiler is available, but is used by
| Gelernter in the geometry program. This was accomplished (on
| the advice of the present author) by using the Fortran compiler
| together with a set of machine language coded functions for
| handling the primitive list processes that go from one element
| of a list to the next"
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| I think the main reason is car/cdr permits elegant recursive
| solutions to problems.
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