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Re: mathematica's syntax is very like lisp language

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg95752] Re: mathematica's syntax is very like lisp language
• From: Jean-Marc Gulliet <jeanmarc.gulliet at gmail.com>
• Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2009 05:02:23 -0500 (EST)
• Organization: The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
• References: <glj85j$dds$1@smc.vnet.net>

In article <glj85j$dds$1 at smc.vnet.net>, water <waterloo2005 at gmail.com> 
wrote:

> mathematica's syntax is very like lisp language.
> 
> is there any relation between mathematica and lisp ?

Two things come to my mind:

..1 The REPL: Read-Eval-Print Loop [1].

..2 To some extent, at the conceptual level: in Mathematica, everything 
is an expression. A Mathematica expression is made of a "head" (that can 
also be itself an expression) followed by zero, one, or more elements, 
i.e. head[element_1, element_2, ...]. 

AFAIR, in LISP, everything/most of the things (this must be checked 
since I am not sure how this is true with object oriented extension and 
LISP's macro mechanism) is a symbolic expression of the form (fun arg_1 
arg_2 ...). 

(In Mathematica, *everything* is an expression is to be taken literally: 
input and output cells are expressions, notebooks are expressions too 
that can be manipulated as any other expressions.)

Regards,
--Jean-Marc

[1] "Read-eval-print loop", from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REPL