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