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R.I.P. John McCarthy


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Post: #5
10-25-2011, 09:50 AM
Howard Owen Offline
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Another seminal figure in the computer revolution has died.

http://mashable.com/2011/10/25/john-mccarthy-dies/

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Post: #6
10-25-2011, 11:34 AM
MK-52 Offline
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(format t "I'm sorry to hear that...")


Edited: 25 Oct 2011, 11:44 a.m.

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Post: #7
10-26-2011, 10:39 AM
Norman Dziedzic Offline
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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

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Post: #8
10-28-2011, 05:36 AM
Nick_S Offline
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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.

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