Re: member returns list

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> We can bet all we want but never know for sure.
> Even the premise "no Lisp" is dubious. Because, why
> was there a Lisp? Say, there was a Lisp because of
> factors A, B, and C. Now, if we are to remove Lisp
> from history and then figure out what the world of
> today would have looked like, should we not only
> remove Lisp, but also A, B, and C? But if we do that,
> how do we know they didn't create something else, in
> parallel with Lisp? Should we remove that as well?
> It is like a dough, or a tree, rather than the linear
> chain of events as you put it. Nothing can ever be
> removed or inserted that is there or isn't there.

The only reason there's LISP was John McCarthy.

He started to work on LISP because Fortran and Algol designers didn't
want to include language features John McCarthy deemed useful, like
ternary IF and COND, or recursivity.  It was plain out of Fortran scope
(and remained so for a long time) and was only included into Algol by
ruse. 
https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-into-programming-a-comedy-of-errors-3/

Notice that list processing (with XCARF and XCDRF) already existed in
Fortran as FLPL (it was invented by Newell, Shaw, and Simon, not by John
McCarthy).  http://www.informatimago.com/articles/flpl/


And I won't say anything about the stress given to Turing Machines over
Lambda Calculus, my bet again is that without John McCarthy, nobody
would know about Church's work anymore.


>> Similarly for the web. Without lisp and the
>> interface builder (a macintosh program written in
>> lisp originally, and therefore doubly dependent on
>> lisp (from the
>> lisp->smalltalk->parc->apple->lisa->mac and from the
>> lisp->dynamic-programming->UI paths), you wouldn't
>> have had nextstep where it was easy, obvious and
>> trivial even, to develop html and WWW
>> server/browser, given the building blocks available.
>> The alternative at the time was Xanadu on the
>> hypertext side, SGML on the document side, and
>> gopher on the client/server side. They could have
>> spend tens of years trying to mix two or three of
>> those into something vaguely ressembling the www,
>> without lisp and NeXTSTEP.
>
> I'm surprised you haven't mentioned XML. No Lisp, no
> XML, right?

Nope. 
XML comes from SGML -> HTML (dead-end), therefore SGML -> XML.


Only good things can derive from Lisp.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a
dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to
keep the man from touching the equipment.” -- Carl Bass CEO Autodesk