knudsen@ihnss.UUCP (09/03/83)
In the great "does C have I/O" discussion, someone claimed that function calls don't really count as part of the language. Actually, anything can be done as a fuction call, so it should be possible to create a language with no syntax at all (except function calls)! Is this then a language? Such a language was developed at MIT back int the late 50's for artificial intelligence work. It spread to Calif. (Irvine) and recently MIT even built machines just to execute this beast. Of course the lack of syntax makes for a lot of (((((()))))))) and hard to read, etc. (yes, they've added infix operations, and the COND isn't really just a function call). SO, is LISP a language? :-) mike k
barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin) (09/05/83)
ihnss!knudsen made the claim that ANYTHING can be done as a function call, and cited Lisp as an example of a language with only function calls and no syntax. As a long-time Lisp programmer, I have to disagree. There is one thing that cannot be done by function calls, and that is control of the order of operations. LISP would be pretty useless without COND, which is not a function; it has a very definite syntax: (cond (predicate . resultants) (predicate . resultants) ...) He was probably confused because the low-level syntax (parens and atoms) is the same as that used for function calls and macro calls, but that is no different than any other langage. In most cases, the common point isn't reached until you go lower: function calls and looping constructs (as one example) in conventional languages are both made up of the same kinds of tokens. -- Barry Margolin ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar