Lisp programming language features of biography example

Java MIT Press.

Lisp historically LISP , an abbreviation of "list processing" is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs , influenced by though not originally derived from [ 9 ] the notation of Alonzo Church 's lambda calculus.

It quickly became a favored programming language for artificial intelligence AI research. Thus, Lisp programs can manipulate source code as a data structure, giving rise to the macro systems that allow programmers to create new syntax or new domain-specific languages embedded in Lisp. The interchangeability of code and data gives Lisp its instantly recognizable syntax.

All program code is written as s-expressions , or parenthesized lists. A function call or syntactic form is written as a list with the function or operator's name first, and the arguments following; for instance, a function f that takes three arguments would be called as f arg1 arg2 arg3. He was motivated by a desire to create an AI programming language that would work on the IBM , as he believed that "IBM looked like a good bet to pursue Artificial Intelligence research vigorously.

However, he was dissatisfied with it because it did not support recursion or a modern if-then-else statement which was a new concept when lisp was first introduced [ note 1 ]. McCarthy's original notation used bracketed " M-expressions " that would be translated into S-expressions.

An example discussed in Chapter 3 is memory management: The Lisp run-time system uses garbage collection to detect memory locations no longer needed by the.

Once Lisp was implemented, programmers rapidly chose to use S-expressions, and M-expressions were abandoned. According to McCarthy [ 17 ]. Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into IBM machine code, fixing bugs , and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was.

So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today