What Made Lisp Different
May 2002) (This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds.)When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most important of which was Fortran.Lisp embodied nine new ideas: 1. They were invented by McCarthy in the course of developing Lisp. (Fortran at that time only had a conditional goto, closely based on the branch instruction in the underlying hardware.) McCarthy, who was on the Algol committee, got conditionals into Algol, whence they spread to most other languages.2.
- ▪May 2002) (This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list.
- ▪It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds.)When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most important of which was Fortran.Lisp embodied nine new ideas: 1.
- ▪They were invented by McCarthy in the course of developing Lisp. (Fortran at that time only had a conditional goto, closely based on the branch instruction in the underlying hardware.) McCarthy, who was on the Algol committee, got condition
Paul Graham — Essays files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 219 of its stories.
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December 2001 (rev. May 2002) (This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds.)When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most important of which was Fortran.Lisp embodied nine new ideas: 1. Conditionals. A conditional is an if-then-else construct. We take these for granted now. They were invented by McCarthy in the course of developing Lisp. (Fortran at that time only had a conditional goto, closely based on the branch instruction in the underlying hardware.) McCarthy, who was on the Algol committee, got conditionals into Algol, whence they spread to most other languages.2. A function type.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Paul Graham — Essays.