
Lisp 1.5 Primer (1967) [pdf] - tjalfi
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/Weismann_LISP1.5_Primer_1967.pdf
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weeber
The language is very small, may be interesting to write an interpreter.

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pjmlp
Or even a very dumb compiler.

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nickpsecurity
Smart thinking. See my other comment. ;)

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pjmlp
Thanks, already printed it out.

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nickpsecurity
Oh nice move. I'd do that but Id take out a rainforest with my collection. ;)

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nickbauman
I love this, but at the risk of farting in church, when I see car and cdr
(instead of the more sane first and rest), I feel as if millions of man hours
suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

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taeric
Meh. The first time I ever see fiiirst or rfst or some nonsense, I'll cry out
in terror.

Till then, I can live with car/cdr/cadr/cadar/etc. Somewhat opaque, but not
nearly as bad as the folks complaining about it.

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nickbauman
Never a noob, were you? Never considered that the source code primacy to
convey the programmer's _intent_ and that a modified lump of sand can do
something with it is a nice side effect?

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taeric
I was certainly a new programmer once. I don't remember this one catching me
offguard anymore than most other things. Lambda, in particular, was much more
to wrap my head around. Or defun. Even define is somewhat awkward.

So, sure, first is more descriptive than car. However, first also should have
applied to an array. And it does, just not in the same way. Which is itself
confusing.

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zerr
More interesting what the implementation looked alike.

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dasmoth
[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/lisp1.5](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/lisp1.5)

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agumonkey
Impossible, this is theoretical at best.

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sctb
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14348231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14348231)
and marked it off-topic. I assume it's in reference to McCarthy being
surprised at Steve Russell's implementation of eval, but I'd be shocked if he
actually said it was impossible.

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agumonkey
He did not say these words, that was indeed what I was referring to.

