Subject: Re: What does LISP stand for?
From: Erik Naggum <clerik@naggum.no>
Date: 1997/08/20
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3081065507533581@naggum.no>


* William Paul Vrotney
| You are wrong.  The whole thing is correct.  

the whole thing is a pathetic excuse for an explanation, _very_ confused.

| The person asking the question said he is not a programmer and did not ask
| the question about a specific Lisp so I did not want to go into specific
| Lisps and their subtypes.

he asked what "LISP" stood for, and that's all he asked.  your first
sentence was correct and to the point, the rest was nowhere near requested,
and confusing to boot.  please spare us the defense of your mistake.

| I suspect your confusion comes about by thinking in terms of a specific
| Lisp.

that others should think in terms of a specific Lisp seems to be a pet
peeve among some who think they are defending Lisp.  I don't understand the
need to be _incorrect_ in addition to _unspecific_ about what Lisp is, but
it's typical of those who do that they are seriously confused about any and
all Lisps that they try to encompass with their definitions.  moreover, it
does _nothing_ to help spread the word of Lisp that some insist on talking
about "vintage Lisp" and hanging on to age-old confusions just because they
don't like Common Lisp.

it _would_ be constructive to say that the Lisp family has two main
branches in modern incarnations: Common Lisp and Scheme, if there is a need
to defend both, but whoever would want to defend, e.g., Emacs Lisp as the
language of choice when talking about Lisp?

| For example in Common Lisp every object is of type T.  The two major
| subtypes of T are LIST and ATOM (or more precisely CONS and ATOM).

this is incorrect.  the type `atom' is just another name for (not cons),
and `atom' is thus _not_ a system class.  the class precedence list of
`cons' is (cons list sequence t).  this should give an idea of how far off
the mark you are, so just can it, OK?

#\Erik
-- 
man who cooks while hacking eats food that has died twice.