18 Mar
2010
18 Mar
'10
2:35 p.m.
Earliest Lisp program, that turns out to be a complicated question that has attracted a historian's attention. Good reading. The earliest non-trivial Lisp bignum program was Fibonacci. I had been testing the nascent software using Fib(100) one afternoon when the phone in the AI Lab computer room rang right next to me. Gosper answered it saying, "Fibonacci of 20". I thought he was making fun of my code, but of course, he was merely identifying the phone extension. Hilarie