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>>> It's an interpreter for a small subset of Scheme, but Scheme is of course itself small and simple†, which means that it's not hard to mentally extrapolate f
by StreamBright 8y ago
>>> It's an interpreter for a small subset of Scheme, but Scheme is of course itself small and simple†, which means that it's not hard to mentally extrapolate from the small subset to the rest of the language. C++ is a large language, and so it would be less compelling to implement a small subset of it
Exactly. This is the point of Lisp. I think many languages are over complicated for no good reason.
- kragen 8y ago① Yes, in a sense, this is the point of "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I." But Lisp is a much larger and more diverse phenomenon than McCarthy's 1960 paper. For example, Common Lisp is not small and simple, although it is not as complicated as C++, and it's still part of "Lisp". ② Regardless of whether it is or is not the point of _Lisp_, it is not really the point of _SICP_, which is about different approaches to structuring programs. One of them is the Lisp approach.