The post is meant to be a joke, and isn't a bad one as such things go, but its fun to note that square brackets and Lisp go back quite a ways, and were a featur

The post is meant to be a joke, and isn't a bad one as such things go, but its fun to note that square brackets and Lisp go back quite a ways, and were a feature of M-expression syntax. [1] It is also interesting to note the reasons why Mathematica's syntax, which shares some similarities to Lisp, uses square brackets instead of parenthesis, specifically to avoid ambiguity when using parenthesis to denote grouping terms. [2] [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression [2]: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/GettingUsedToMathematica.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/GettingUse...