Arc Forumnew | comments | leaders | submitlogin
Why lisp started out with parentheses and uppercase
6 points by akkartik 5105 days ago | 1 comment
From http://hhh.gavilan.edu/dvantassel/history/00-intro.html:

"early keyboards had no lower case letters (abc…). They only had uppercase (ABC…). Thus case sensitivity could not be used for statements or variable names. There were only round parenthesis and no square brackets […], or curly braces {…}."



4 points by akkartik 5101 days ago | link

I also enjoyed this quote by McCarthy:

"Lisp's notation gives up the familiar infix notations in favor of a notation that simplifies the task of programming the substantive computations, e.g., logical deduction or algebraic simplification, differentiation or integration. The advantage is like that of binary computers over decimal--but larger."

http://www.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/Prag-Parse.html via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3039844

-----