On 1/24/16 6:22 PM, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> 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.
>

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.

Miles Fidelman



--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra