On March 29, 2006 5:09 PM Ralf Hemmecke wrote: > > Maybe some people are very accustomed to SExpressions, I am > not. I am perfectly happy with Lists whose elements have a > particular type, for example, "List(Boolean)". Sexpressions > are already a bit more complicated. And I cannot belief that > they are the most natural thing that a mathematician can > think of. >
I am not sure how to define "natural" but the concept of an S-expression was certainly invented by a mathematician. If you haven't already read, it I think John McCarthy's paper original 1960 paper: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.html "RECURSIVE FUNCTIONS OF SYMBOLIC EXPRESSIONS AND THEIR COMPUTATION BY MACHINE" See also http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/index.html http://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html > > Aldor is designed to compile to Lisp as one option. > > It is natural to continue to use this in Axiom. > > I am not against LISP. If code can be re-used then it's fine. > But there was already someone on the list who said that it > would not be so easy to build a (symbolic-algebra) object > library that could be linked to Fortran or C (or any other > language) programs. Why? > > Anyway, that Lisp discussion is quite useful for me. In Axiom > I am sometimes missing the "Rep" of a domain. > > src/algebra/boolean.spad.pamphlet > > Now I belief, that in such a case the representation is an > SExpression. Wrong? > Exactly right! The representation is inherited from Lisp. I think that it should be acceptible to write: Rep == Lisp just like we can write $Lisp In other words from the point of view of SPAD and Aldor Lisp should appear just like a pre-defined domain. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
