On 2016-01-24 22:58 +0000, Rainer Weikusat wrote:

> When John McCarthy initially designed the language, S-expression (the
> stuff in brackets) where supposed to be for use by the machine while a
> to-be-created later M-expression syntax was supposed to offer a more
> familiar 'algebraic syntax' to humans. But S-expression syntax turned
> out to be so popular that the M-expression project was
> dropped. Unfortunately, this means that Lisp categorially doesn't
> resemble algebraic expressions in any way, and people tend to reject
> 'unfamiliar stuff' out of hand because it's unfamiliar, especially when
> they've invested a sizable amount of effort into learning
> (now) familiar stuff.

The Lisp with M-expressions is called ML.

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