*append *is defined early in McCarthy's original paper: 1. append [x;y]. append [x; y] = [null[x] [image: $\rightarrow$] y; T [image: $\rightarrow$]cons [car [x]; append [cdr [x]; y]]] An example is append [(A, B); (C, D, E)] = (A, B, C, D, E) ---from http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive/node3.html I'm sure people 'executed' it in their head when reading the paper. On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 12:12 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
The discussion of the 40-year anniversary of the Internet in Oct'09 talked about the first message ever sent: "lo" (the first two characters of "login"; the machine crashed before "g"!).
I was wondering what was the first non-trivial (i.e., with a loop or recursion) Lisp function ever executed. I would be willing to guess "APPEND", because I think that the first Lisp didn't have numbers, so "FACT" (factorial) wasn't in the running.
Does anyone here know the answer?
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