Lisp-no-yama - Responses

Re: What if Lisp was invented by the Japanese?

itsnotvalid — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:42:59 GMT

So we have assembly in Verb-Subject-Object pattern isn't it?

I personally only fluent in languages that are Subject-Verb-Object (well, Chinese and English) and also know some Japanese (which is argueablly, not all the time Subject-Object-Verb) and found that not as hard to grasp once you have heard enough in the other pattern.

Re: What if Lisp was invented by the Japanese?

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:57:28 GMT

From a programming perspective this is just switching to postfix. Postfix is brilliant at cleanly expressing an algorithin and is very easy to parse and process. It also removes any requirment for parentheses.

(((4 5 +) 3 *) print)

becomes:

45+ 3* print

The original infix version of this would be:

print ( ( 4+5 ) *3 )

As pointed out by previous commenter postfix was the syntax used by Forth although what really distinguished Forth was that it was primarily a stack machine and a threaded interpreter (whole other topics). Using a stack machine to proces postfix expressions is simple and efficent.

Re: What if Lisp was invented by the Japanese?

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:03:06 GMT

In RPN, you can omit the parens even with optional arguments; all that needs to happen is that the procedures consume and produce the appropriate number of symbols from the stack.

Parens merely help enable code validation; they're not required for your code to work.