The Roots of Lisp

The Roots of Lisp



In this blog I'll talk about the article called "The roots of Lisp" by Paul Graham, who is a british programmer who founded Viaweb and he is the co-founder of Combinator. The author describes the origins of LISP, where Jonh McCarthy participated in the creation.

Paul made a review of what John MacCarthy found when he discovered this new notation to do the mathematical notation more easier to understand. This reading has been the most difficult to understand of the whole course, so I will try to make a brief summary of what I could understand and give my opinion.

The articles begins with the differences between the structure of the programs in C and LISP, and he mention two basic types, that was the atoms and the lists.

Lists refers to the concept that we have always understood in programming languages, but in the case of atom, it's a new concept for me, atoms in LISP is a word for all data types that are not cons cells (like numbers, characters, strings, symbols).
Sometimes I keep reading the LISP code as if it were the code of C, starting from left to right and not from right to left.
Then Paul mention 7 primitive operators:
  • quote
  • atom
  • eq
  • car
  • cdr
  • cons
  • cond
With this operators we can write any other function.It seems that it is going to be a difficult topic to understand, as it has been to understand how LISP works, but I am sure that topics like these will not help improve our programming techniques and will make us see the problems with a greater clarity.

























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