When did Lisp start using symbols for arithmetic?
Looking through the August 1979 issue of Byte magazine, it discusses a dialect of Lisp in which arithmetic operations are denoted by words like PLUS and TIMES.
Later dialects like Common Lisp and Scheme use the symbols common to other languages like + and *.
When did Lisp generally switch from one convention to the other?
history lisp
asked Mar 28 at 14:47
rwallacerwallace
10.6k454159
add a comment |
Looking through the August 1979 issue of Byte magazine, it discusses a dialect of Lisp in which arithmetic operations are denoted by words like PLUS and TIMES.
Later dialects like Common Lisp and Scheme use the symbols common to other languages like + and *.
When did Lisp generally switch from one convention to the other?
history lisp
asked Mar 28 at 14:47
rwallacerwallace
10.6k454159
1
Are you able to give more information about the dialect of Lisp you were just reading about?
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:29
@Wilson It doesn't seem to say what the dialect is specifically called, or if it does, I missed it. The Byte issue can be downloaded in PDF if you want to take a look yourself.
– rwallace
Mar 29 at 4:37
1
Scheme is actually earlier than 1979. Scheme was first described in 1975 and had already + and *.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:09
add a comment |
Looking through the August 1979 issue of Byte magazine, it discusses a dialect of Lisp in which arithmetic operations are denoted by words like PLUS and TIMES.
Later dialects like Common Lisp and Scheme use the symbols common to other languages like + and *.
When did Lisp generally switch from one convention to the other?
history lisp
asked Mar 28 at 14:47
rwallacerwallace
10.6k454159
Looking through the August 1979 issue of Byte magazine, it discusses a dialect of Lisp in which arithmetic operations are denoted by words like PLUS and TIMES.
Later dialects like Common Lisp and Scheme use the symbols common to other languages like + and *.
When did Lisp generally switch from one convention to the other?
history lisp
history lisp
asked Mar 28 at 14:47
rwallacerwallace
10.6k454159
asked Mar 28 at 14:47
rwallacerwallace
10.6k454159
asked Mar 28 at 14:47
rwallacerwallace
10.6k454159
asked Mar 28 at 14:47
rwallacerwallace
10.6k454159
asked Mar 28 at 14:47
rwallacerwallace
10.6k454159
10.6k454159
1
Are you able to give more information about the dialect of Lisp you were just reading about?
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:29
@Wilson It doesn't seem to say what the dialect is specifically called, or if it does, I missed it. The Byte issue can be downloaded in PDF if you want to take a look yourself.
– rwallace
Mar 29 at 4:37
1
Scheme is actually earlier than 1979. Scheme was first described in 1975 and had already + and *.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:09
add a comment |
1
Are you able to give more information about the dialect of Lisp you were just reading about?
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:29
@Wilson It doesn't seem to say what the dialect is specifically called, or if it does, I missed it. The Byte issue can be downloaded in PDF if you want to take a look yourself.
– rwallace
Mar 29 at 4:37
1
Scheme is actually earlier than 1979. Scheme was first described in 1975 and had already + and *.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:09
1
1
Are you able to give more information about the dialect of Lisp you were just reading about?
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:29
Are you able to give more information about the dialect of Lisp you were just reading about?
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:29
@Wilson It doesn't seem to say what the dialect is specifically called, or if it does, I missed it. The Byte issue can be downloaded in PDF if you want to take a look yourself.
– rwallace
Mar 29 at 4:37
@Wilson It doesn't seem to say what the dialect is specifically called, or if it does, I missed it. The Byte issue can be downloaded in PDF if you want to take a look yourself.
– rwallace
Mar 29 at 4:37
1
1
Scheme is actually earlier than 1979. Scheme was first described in 1975 and had already + and *.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:09
Scheme is actually earlier than 1979. Scheme was first described in 1975 and had already + and *.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:09
add a comment |
1 Answer
1
active
oldest
votes
Lisp is not a single language, but a whole ecosystem of different languages. Moreover, there's no standard covering all Lisps, like with C or Fortran, so for this reason, + and plus are equally "valid".
When Lisp 1 (March 1960) was written, the primitive operations defined were car, cdr, cons, and, or, cond, etc. The arithmetic operations were not primitives at that time, so the programmers chose their own names.
At least Lisp 1.5 (early 60s) had both.
But this Lisp from 1970 had PLUS and MINUS but no + nor -.
If you consider Scheme (1975) to be a Lisp, then it is a specimen having both + and &+ (the latter is an optimisation for two arguments only).
And Common Lisp (1984) has + but not plus as you have noted.
So I posit that we gradually settled on +-style symbols starting in the 70s, and the situation was a state of flux before then, for the reason that arithmetic operations were not even primitive operations to begin with.
answered Mar 28 at 15:12
WilsonWilson
12.4k557139
2
Common Lisp does have a standard; in fact it was the first object-oriented language to get an ANSI standard.
– sds
Mar 28 at 16:18
11
@sds, That's right, but there's no standard that covers everything that I'd personally call Lisp.
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:24
2
The way I read the LISP 1.0 doc, the arithmetic functions have to have alphanumeric names, since they're atoms, and atoms have names that are alphanumeric.
– another-dave
Mar 28 at 22:04
2
Agree; but I meant "+ was not possible" rather than "PLUS is the only possibility".
– another-dave
Mar 29 at 12:01
1
The Lisp I manual specified the functions SUM and PRDCT for float operations. It provides PLUS and TIMES for use in symbolic algebraic expressions. See the function SMPLFY.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:06
|
show 1 more comment
Your Answer
StackExchange.ready(function() {
var channelOptions = {
tags: "".split(" "),
id: "648"
};
initTagRenderer("".split(" "), "".split(" "), channelOptions);
StackExchange.using("externalEditor", function() {
// Have to fire editor after snippets, if snippets enabled
if (StackExchange.settings.snippets.snippetsEnabled) {
StackExchange.using("snippets", function() {
createEditor();
});
}
else {
createEditor();
}
});
function createEditor() {
StackExchange.prepareEditor({
heartbeatType: 'answer',
autoActivateHeartbeat: false,
convertImagesToLinks: false,
noModals: true,
showLowRepImageUploadWarning: true,
reputationToPostImages: null,
bindNavPrevention: true,
postfix: "",
imageUploader: {
brandingHtml: "Powered by u003ca class="icon-imgur-white" href="https://imgur.com/"u003eu003c/au003e",
contentPolicyHtml: "User contributions licensed under u003ca href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"u003ecc by-sa 3.0 with attribution requiredu003c/au003e u003ca href="https://stackoverflow.com/legal/content-policy"u003e(content policy)u003c/au003e",
allowUrls: true
},
noCode: true, onDemand: true,
discardSelector: ".discard-answer"
,immediatelyShowMarkdownHelp:true
});
}
});
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function () {
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
});
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
StackExchange.ready(
function () {
StackExchange.openid.initPostLogin('.new-post-login', 'https%3a%2f%2fretrocomputing.stackexchange.com%2fquestions%2f9453%2fwhen-did-lisp-start-using-symbols-for-arithmetic%23new-answer', 'question_page');
}
);
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
1 Answer
1
active
oldest
votes
1 Answer
1
active
oldest
votes
active
oldest
votes
active
oldest
votes
Lisp is not a single language, but a whole ecosystem of different languages. Moreover, there's no standard covering all Lisps, like with C or Fortran, so for this reason, + and plus are equally "valid".
When Lisp 1 (March 1960) was written, the primitive operations defined were car, cdr, cons, and, or, cond, etc. The arithmetic operations were not primitives at that time, so the programmers chose their own names.
At least Lisp 1.5 (early 60s) had both.
But this Lisp from 1970 had PLUS and MINUS but no + nor -.
If you consider Scheme (1975) to be a Lisp, then it is a specimen having both + and &+ (the latter is an optimisation for two arguments only).
And Common Lisp (1984) has + but not plus as you have noted.
So I posit that we gradually settled on +-style symbols starting in the 70s, and the situation was a state of flux before then, for the reason that arithmetic operations were not even primitive operations to begin with.
answered Mar 28 at 15:12
WilsonWilson
12.4k557139
2
Common Lisp does have a standard; in fact it was the first object-oriented language to get an ANSI standard.
– sds
Mar 28 at 16:18
11
@sds, That's right, but there's no standard that covers everything that I'd personally call Lisp.
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:24
2
The way I read the LISP 1.0 doc, the arithmetic functions have to have alphanumeric names, since they're atoms, and atoms have names that are alphanumeric.
– another-dave
Mar 28 at 22:04
2
Agree; but I meant "+ was not possible" rather than "PLUS is the only possibility".
– another-dave
Mar 29 at 12:01
1
The Lisp I manual specified the functions SUM and PRDCT for float operations. It provides PLUS and TIMES for use in symbolic algebraic expressions. See the function SMPLFY.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:06
|
show 1 more comment
Lisp is not a single language, but a whole ecosystem of different languages. Moreover, there's no standard covering all Lisps, like with C or Fortran, so for this reason, + and plus are equally "valid".
When Lisp 1 (March 1960) was written, the primitive operations defined were car, cdr, cons, and, or, cond, etc. The arithmetic operations were not primitives at that time, so the programmers chose their own names.
At least Lisp 1.5 (early 60s) had both.
But this Lisp from 1970 had PLUS and MINUS but no + nor -.
If you consider Scheme (1975) to be a Lisp, then it is a specimen having both + and &+ (the latter is an optimisation for two arguments only).
And Common Lisp (1984) has + but not plus as you have noted.
So I posit that we gradually settled on +-style symbols starting in the 70s, and the situation was a state of flux before then, for the reason that arithmetic operations were not even primitive operations to begin with.
answered Mar 28 at 15:12
WilsonWilson
12.4k557139
2
Common Lisp does have a standard; in fact it was the first object-oriented language to get an ANSI standard.
– sds
Mar 28 at 16:18
11
@sds, That's right, but there's no standard that covers everything that I'd personally call Lisp.
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:24
2
The way I read the LISP 1.0 doc, the arithmetic functions have to have alphanumeric names, since they're atoms, and atoms have names that are alphanumeric.
– another-dave
Mar 28 at 22:04
2
Agree; but I meant "+ was not possible" rather than "PLUS is the only possibility".
– another-dave
Mar 29 at 12:01
1
The Lisp I manual specified the functions SUM and PRDCT for float operations. It provides PLUS and TIMES for use in symbolic algebraic expressions. See the function SMPLFY.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:06
|
show 1 more comment
Lisp is not a single language, but a whole ecosystem of different languages. Moreover, there's no standard covering all Lisps, like with C or Fortran, so for this reason, + and plus are equally "valid".
When Lisp 1 (March 1960) was written, the primitive operations defined were car, cdr, cons, and, or, cond, etc. The arithmetic operations were not primitives at that time, so the programmers chose their own names.
At least Lisp 1.5 (early 60s) had both.
But this Lisp from 1970 had PLUS and MINUS but no + nor -.
If you consider Scheme (1975) to be a Lisp, then it is a specimen having both + and &+ (the latter is an optimisation for two arguments only).
And Common Lisp (1984) has + but not plus as you have noted.
So I posit that we gradually settled on +-style symbols starting in the 70s, and the situation was a state of flux before then, for the reason that arithmetic operations were not even primitive operations to begin with.
answered Mar 28 at 15:12
WilsonWilson
12.4k557139
Lisp is not a single language, but a whole ecosystem of different languages. Moreover, there's no standard covering all Lisps, like with C or Fortran, so for this reason, + and plus are equally "valid".
When Lisp 1 (March 1960) was written, the primitive operations defined were car, cdr, cons, and, or, cond, etc. The arithmetic operations were not primitives at that time, so the programmers chose their own names.
At least Lisp 1.5 (early 60s) had both.
But this Lisp from 1970 had PLUS and MINUS but no + nor -.
If you consider Scheme (1975) to be a Lisp, then it is a specimen having both + and &+ (the latter is an optimisation for two arguments only).
And Common Lisp (1984) has + but not plus as you have noted.
So I posit that we gradually settled on +-style symbols starting in the 70s, and the situation was a state of flux before then, for the reason that arithmetic operations were not even primitive operations to begin with.
answered Mar 28 at 15:12
WilsonWilson
12.4k557139
edited Mar 28 at 16:25
answered Mar 28 at 15:12
WilsonWilson
12.4k557139
answered Mar 28 at 15:12
WilsonWilson
12.4k557139
answered Mar 28 at 15:12
WilsonWilson
12.4k557139
12.4k557139
2
Common Lisp does have a standard; in fact it was the first object-oriented language to get an ANSI standard.
– sds
Mar 28 at 16:18
11
@sds, That's right, but there's no standard that covers everything that I'd personally call Lisp.
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:24
2
The way I read the LISP 1.0 doc, the arithmetic functions have to have alphanumeric names, since they're atoms, and atoms have names that are alphanumeric.
– another-dave
Mar 28 at 22:04
2
Agree; but I meant "+ was not possible" rather than "PLUS is the only possibility".
– another-dave
Mar 29 at 12:01
1
The Lisp I manual specified the functions SUM and PRDCT for float operations. It provides PLUS and TIMES for use in symbolic algebraic expressions. See the function SMPLFY.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:06
|
show 1 more comment
2
Common Lisp does have a standard; in fact it was the first object-oriented language to get an ANSI standard.
– sds
Mar 28 at 16:18
11
@sds, That's right, but there's no standard that covers everything that I'd personally call Lisp.
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:24
2
The way I read the LISP 1.0 doc, the arithmetic functions have to have alphanumeric names, since they're atoms, and atoms have names that are alphanumeric.
– another-dave
Mar 28 at 22:04
2
Agree; but I meant "+ was not possible" rather than "PLUS is the only possibility".
– another-dave
Mar 29 at 12:01
1
The Lisp I manual specified the functions SUM and PRDCT for float operations. It provides PLUS and TIMES for use in symbolic algebraic expressions. See the function SMPLFY.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:06
2
2
Common Lisp does have a standard; in fact it was the first object-oriented language to get an ANSI standard.
– sds
Mar 28 at 16:18
Common Lisp does have a standard; in fact it was the first object-oriented language to get an ANSI standard.
– sds
Mar 28 at 16:18
11
11
@sds, That's right, but there's no standard that covers everything that I'd personally call Lisp.
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:24
@sds, That's right, but there's no standard that covers everything that I'd personally call Lisp.
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:24
2
2
The way I read the LISP 1.0 doc, the arithmetic functions have to have alphanumeric names, since they're atoms, and atoms have names that are alphanumeric.
– another-dave
Mar 28 at 22:04
The way I read the LISP 1.0 doc, the arithmetic functions have to have alphanumeric names, since they're atoms, and atoms have names that are alphanumeric.
– another-dave
Mar 28 at 22:04
2
2
Agree; but I meant "+ was not possible" rather than "PLUS is the only possibility".
– another-dave
Mar 29 at 12:01
Agree; but I meant "+ was not possible" rather than "PLUS is the only possibility".
– another-dave
Mar 29 at 12:01
1
1
The Lisp I manual specified the functions SUM and PRDCT for float operations. It provides PLUS and TIMES for use in symbolic algebraic expressions. See the function SMPLFY.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:06
The Lisp I manual specified the functions SUM and PRDCT for float operations. It provides PLUS and TIMES for use in symbolic algebraic expressions. See the function SMPLFY.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:06
|
show 1 more comment
Thanks for contributing an answer to Retrocomputing Stack Exchange!
- Please be sure to answer the question. Provide details and share your research!
But avoid …
- Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers.
- Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience.
To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers.
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function () {
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
});
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
StackExchange.ready(
function () {
StackExchange.openid.initPostLogin('.new-post-login', 'https%3a%2f%2fretrocomputing.stackexchange.com%2fquestions%2f9453%2fwhen-did-lisp-start-using-symbols-for-arithmetic%23new-answer', 'question_page');
}
);
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function () {
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
});
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function () {
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
});
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function () {
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
});
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
1
Are you able to give more information about the dialect of Lisp you were just reading about?
– Wilson
Mar 28 at 16:29
@Wilson It doesn't seem to say what the dialect is specifically called, or if it does, I missed it. The Byte issue can be downloaded in PDF if you want to take a look yourself.
– rwallace
Mar 29 at 4:37
1
Scheme is actually earlier than 1979. Scheme was first described in 1975 and had already + and *.
– Rainer Joswig
Apr 2 at 7:09