LISP Rocks! (was: Re: Python Rocks! :-)

[François Pinard]

"Tim Peters" <tim_one at email.msn.com> écrit:

> > P.S. - SNOBOL was [...] Multi-punches all the time.

> Oh yes!  But typical SNOBOL4 programs were tiny compared to typical Pascal
> programs, and at the time the latter was introduced, my school's keypunches
> still lacked a semicolon key.

But for Pascal, the semi-colon was the only missing key.  Rather bearable.
SNOBOL, *that* was using a lot of "non-standard" characters, all the time.

Do I dream, or keypunches only had capital letters?  Printers did not have
small letters anyway.  I do remember that people were using digit suffixes
to mark diacritics, and using double or triple line spacing on the printer
as an attempt to render them.  Later, when ASCII became more widely used,
we got to use one `!' prefix to introduce cased letters, `!'-digit for
diacriticised letters, and two `!' prefixes for marking control characters
(with later ubiquitous conversion and processing, of course :-).

Life is so much fun in these days.  Yet, apparently, some feel miserable
because they ought to type on the space bar a few times once in a while! ;-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard