McCarthy himself said of his pre-Lisp research: "To use functions as arguments, one needs a notation for functions, and it seemed natural to use the -notation

McCarthy himself said of his pre-Lisp research: "To use functions as arguments, one needs a notation for functions, and it seemed natural to use the -notation of Church (1941). I didn't understand the rest of his book, so I wasn't tempted to try to implement his more general mechanism for defining functions. Church used higher order functionals instead of using conditional expressions. Conditional expressions are much more readily implemented on computers." - History of Lisp: http://goo.gl/EDuhl http://goo.gl/EDuhl I've always liked the fact the he did so much with a book he didn't understand the whole of. :-)