HP Forum Archive 20

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R.I.P. John McCarthy Message #1 Posted by Howard Owen on 25 Oct 2011, 9:50 a.m. Another seminal figure in the computer revolution has died. http://mashable.com/2011/10/25/john-mccarthy-dies/

Re: R.I.P. John McCarthy Message #2 Posted by MK-52 on 25 Oct 2011, 11:34 a.m., in response to message #1 by Howard Owen (format t "I'm sorry to hear that...") Edited: 25 Oct 2011, 11:44 a.m.

Re: R.I.P. John McCarthy Message #3 Posted by Norman Dziedzic on 26 Oct 2011, 10:39 a.m., in response to message #2 by MK-52 Strangely for a mechanical engineer, I have had exposure to LISP. We used to call it, "Lots of Irritating Silly Parenthesis". It was used as the scripting language for AutoCAD software. RIP John McCarthy

Re: R.I.P. John McCarthy Message #4 Posted by Nick_S on 28 Oct 2011, 5:36 a.m., in response to message #3 by Norman Dziedzic That is shame. His LISP language seems to have been an important influence on HP's RPL, where HP removed the need for parentheses by making theirs a post-fix functional language drawing on their own RPN and Forth. I still get a buzz out of passing named and anonymous functions around as parameters, e.g, when using the R language or one of my HP calculators, rather than just manipulating data. Nick Edited: 28 Oct 2011, 5:39 a.m.

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