Lisp in Brockhaus

[Janos Blazi]

Brockhaus is one of the leading German Encyclopaedias. It says about Lisp
something like this:
First the origins of Lisp. Then about CL: it has been around since 1984 (?)
and has been standadized by ANSI. Rather than using number and the like,
which is done by procdural languages like C or Pascal, it uses symbols. The
simplest symbols are called atoms (I am not sure if I remember this
correctly) and with them you can create more complicated symbols. Thus it is
very suitable for symbolical calculations and is applied in AI in many
places.

It seems to me that this is fair.

Janos Blazi

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[Coby Beck]

"Janos Blazi" <jbl...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:3bdf1...@news.newsgroups.com...

> Brockhaus is one of the leading German Encyclopaedias. It says about Lisp
> something like this:
> First the origins of Lisp. Then about CL: it has been around since 1984 (?)
> and has been standadized by ANSI. Rather than using number and the like,
> which is done by procdural languages like C or Pascal, it uses symbols. The
> simplest symbols are called atoms (I am not sure if I remember this
> correctly) and with them you can create more complicated symbols. Thus it is
> very suitable for symbolical calculations and is applied in AI in many
> places.
>
> It seems to me that this is fair.
>

Perhaps "symbols" there should be "s-expressions" It doesn't make much sense
to me otherwise.

It would be fair if lisp didn't have numeric capabilities. I don't think that
is a very informative description at all, but it is at least devoid of any
performance slights.

Coby
--
(remove #\space "coby . beck @ opentechgroup . com")

[Thomas Strathmann]

> Perhaps "symbols" there should be "s-expressions" It doesn't make much sense
> to me otherwise.

That's the whole point of the original posting, I think. ;-) Normally those
definitions you find in everyday literature are incomplete, wrong and
sometimes even derogatory. In one of those books that claimed to be a
comprehensive guide to everything in computer science I read some very
interesting things like "C is derived from Pascal" and "Lisp is too hard to
use it" or something like that. My point here is that you will often find
books that judge the languages they write about. Everyone knows that books
from the last century all advertise Pascal as the best language that is
suitable for everything. ;-)

> It would be fair if lisp didn't have numeric capabilities. I don't think that
> is a very informative description at all, but it is at least devoid of any
> performance slights.

The "Brockhaus" is just a starting point and not at all useful for anything
other than looking up what some important person did and when he (or she) lived.
The more scientific a topic gets the less accurate are the definitions
you'll find in there. It's so sad.

Thomas

--
Thomas S. Strathmann
http://www.tstrathmann.de & http://www.pdp7.org