Why is Python popular, while Lisp and Scheme aren't?

Anders J. Munch andersjm at inbound.dk
Sun Nov 10 14:00:51 EST 2002


"Jens Axel Søgaard" <usenet at jasoegaard.dk> wrote:
> >
> > I'm curious: what exactly did McCarthy's new syntax look like?  Have
> > you got any pointers to specs, examples or such on the web?
>
> I can't remember a link - but if you want to Google for them,
> they were calles M-expressions.

Tried that, but every professor teaching Lisp/Scheme seems to mention
M-expressions in passing before proceeding to S-exprs, drowning any
useful information.

I wonder if M-expressions changed the concrete syntax but preserved
the abstract syntax? I mean did it preserve the basic
everything-is-a-cons-or-atom model just adding some infix syntactic
sugar on top, or was it fundamentally different?

- Anders






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