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+--- Thread: R.I.P. John McCarthy (/thread-202888.html)
R.I.P. John McCarthy - Howard Owen - 10-25-2011
Another seminal figure in the computer revolution has died.
http://mashable.com/2011/10/25/john-mccarthy-dies/
Re: R.I.P. John McCarthy - MK-52 - 10-25-2011
(format t "I'm sorry to hear that...")
Edited: 25 Oct 2011, 11:44 a.m.
Re: R.I.P. John McCarthy - Norman Dziedzic - 10-26-2011
Strangely for a mechanical engineer, I have had exposure to LISP. We used to call it, "Lots of Irritating Silly Parenthesis".
It was used as the scripting language for AutoCAD software.
RIP John McCarthy
Re: R.I.P. John McCarthy - Nick_S - 10-28-2011
That is shame. His LISP language seems to have been an important influence on HP's RPL, where HP removed the need for parentheses by making theirs a post-fix functional language drawing on their own RPN and Forth. I still get a buzz out of passing named and anonymous functions around as parameters, e.g, when using the R language or one of my HP calculators, rather than just manipulating data.
Nick
Edited: 28 Oct 2011, 5:39 a.m.