Kaz Kylheku <kaz@ashi.footprints.net> wrote:
+---------------
| > >   The book: (plus 2 3)
| > >   The CLISP: (+ 2 3)
| 
| Before the truth is revealed, I'm going to submit a guess that it's
| Chaitlin, who likes to write in a hyper-excited manner about Lisp, but
| invents his own screwy dialects of it.
+---------------

Actually, Chaitin's dialect is *much* screwier than that: The original
version was a mostly parenthesis-free Schemish syntax, with *only*
fixed-arity function [no &OPTIONAL/&KEY/&REST], and was painful for
a Lisp programmer to read:

	define (fact N) if = N 0 1 * N (fact - N 1)

And all because it saves a few characters and thus slightly lowers a
noncritical constant in one of his proofs! *Feh!*

Later versions <URL:http://www.cs.umaine.edu/%7echaitin/unknowable/lisp.html>
are even *worse*, adding a mishmash of S-expr & M-expr [*not* the same as
McCarthy's M-exprs!] in the same code, with funny syntax to switch back &
forth [e.g., he steals double-quote for a single prefix character for
escape-to-M-expr]. All in all, he would have been *much* better off in the
long run to have simply used standard S-expr syntax everywhere.

Other than that, I confess I find his work quite fascinating...  ;-}  ;-}


-Rob

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Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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