[math-fun] Earliest Lisp program ?
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?
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
*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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participants (3)
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Henry Baker -
Hilarie Orman -
Paul Reiners