Friday, March 18, 2005

Cooking with Lisp

Cooking with Lisp: "Robert W. Floyd's 1978 Turing Award Lecture, hosted by Markus Fix here, and he has a great quote about Lisp:
I have seen numerous examples of the programming power which Lisp programmers obtain from having a single data structure, which is also used as a uniform syntactic structure for all the functions and operations which appear in programs, with the capability to manipulate programs as data. Although my own previous enthusiasm has been for syntactically rich languages like the Algol family, I now see clearly and concretely the force of Minsky's 1970 Turing lecture, in which he argued that Lisp's uniformity of structure and power of self reference gave the programmer capabilities whose content was well worth the sacrifice of visual form. "

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