On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 06:55:58PM -0800, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> On 2016-01-24 21:37 -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>
> > >The Lisp with M-expressions is called ML.
> > >
> >
> > Ummm.... no. ML was developed at U. of Edinburgh, had very little to do with Lisp,
> > other than being implemented on top of Lisp (Lisp is very good for building
> > domain-specific languages.) Some history at
> > http://sml-family.org/history/ML2015-talk.pdf
> >
> > You're thinking of MLISP.
>
> Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLisp :
>
> MLISP2 was called a transitional language by the authors. Larry Tesler
> improved the pattern matching system to implement a successor language
> called LISP70, which was only completed to a preliminary version. Though
> this path of LISP evolution is widely neglected, it resembles some
> features, later found in ML or Scheme.
>
> I was not trying to say that there is a historical line of development
> from Lisp to ML, but that a hypothetical well-designed Lisp with infix
> syntax looks a lot like ML.

And, unless I misundrstand ML completely (the dialect I use is OCAML),
ML lacks the inherent metarecusrion of Lisp.

-- hendrik