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0 pointslispm6y ago0 comments

Functions with side-effects are common in LISP. That's why LISP functions are more like traditional procedures and less like mathematical functions. There was a mathematical 'theory' presented, but it differed from the actual programming language LISP (see the LISP 1 Programmer's Manual, 1960): https://kyber.io/rawvids/LISP_I_Programmers_Manual_LISP_I_Pr...

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j-pb6y ago· 1 in thread

Did you even read the piece by McCarty? He talks about how it was meant as an alternative to the computational models based on turing machines in addition to a symbolic computation tool for AI and therefore used side effects for convenience but also tried to keep mathematical properties, like referential transparency.

Tbh it seems pointless discussing this with you because the idea of common lisp being the embodyment of the lisp philosophy seems to have become personal to you. Sorry my energy reservoirs are drained, I'm just gonna ignore your posts, and head back to work, there's a large CL codebase that needs to be rewritten to clojure and that's stressful enough.

lispmOP6y ago

> Did you even read the piece by McCarty?

Sure, the paper was more a side-effect of their work on LISP 1 and the mathematical ideas were developed at the end of the first phase of the development & implementation of LISP.

> He talks about how it was meant as an alternative to the computational models based on turing machines in addition to a symbolic computation tool for AI and therefore used side effects for convenience but also tried to keep mathematical properties, like referential transparency.

The programming language LISP 1 had SET, SETQ, control flow via GOTO, setting of slots of cons cells, destructive operations for list processing, destructive property list operations, ...

LISP was an actual programming system for a real computer, their IBM 704. It was a LISP implementation written in assembler and LISP with stuff like an interpreter, a compiler, garbage collection, input/output, a kind of read-eval-print-loop, saving memory dumps and loading them, writing/loading assembler code from LISP, and all that stuff which is in a typical LISP implementation since then.

The chapter you linked to even has the title 'The implementation of LISP'.

Check out the LISP 1 manual I linked to sometime.

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