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It's actually Language of Irritating Superfluous Parenthesis. Anyway, even saying "code is linked list" does not really cut it as you can represent 'ordinary'
by anon04532 9y ago
It's actually Language of Irritating Superfluous Parenthesis.
Anyway, even saying "code is linked list" does not really cut it as you can represent 'ordinary' programming language program as a list of tokens. What makes LISP special is that code is a first class citizen and the mapping between code you edit and the programs run-time memory representation is trivial. Combined, you get this special feeling that "code is data".
- carapace 9y agoWell, I think lisper nailed it in the article: It's not just that the code is represented as data structured in linked-lists, it's that that data exposes the semantic structure of the code in ways that are more pragmatically useful (among other nice properties) than char strings. When you get into the LISP interpreter itself, which is just a linked-list structure describing how to process linked-list structures (like itself) as code, well... Here's William Byrd on "The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written" (ye LISP interpreter) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyfBQmvr2Hc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyfBQmvr2Hc