PLS Lab

Lisp

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Turner's myths about Lisp

Turner 2013 records a number of 'myths' about Lisp:

  • Something called “Pure LISP” never existed — McCarthy (1978) records that LISP had assignment and goto before it had conditional expressions and recursion.
  • LISP was not based on the lambda calculus, despite using the word “LAMBDA” to denote functions. ... The theoretical model behind LISP was Kleene’s theory of first order recursive functions.
  • Not until SCHEME (Sussman 1975) did versions of LISP with default static binding appear. Today all versions of LISP are lambda calculus based.

See also

References

Turner, D. A. “Some History of Functional Programming Languages.” In Trends in Functional Programming, edited by Hans-Wolfgang Loidl and Ricardo Peña, 7829:1–20. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40447-4_1.
pdf 
@inproceedings{turner_2013,
	location = {Berlin, Heidelberg},
	title = {Some History of Functional Programming Languages},
	volume = {7829},
	doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-40447-4_1},
	series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
	pages = {1--20},
	booktitle = {Trends in Functional Programming},
	publisher = {Springer Berlin Heidelberg},
	author = {Turner, D. A.},
	editor = {Loidl, Hans-Wolfgang and Peña, Ricardo},
	date = {2013}
}