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Re: Is perl still the No.1 language for sysadmin?





On 4/2/23 18:15, Emanuel Berg wrote:
David Christensen wrote:

Look at the use of parentheses in Lisp [...]

I have thought about that - is Lisp possible without them?
But how do you then know priority? I'm sure someone tried to
get rid of them, but how?

Its quite a few years since I had anything to do with Lisp, and even more since I wrote my Symbolic Logic final using parenthesis-free Polish notation (i.e., Reversed RPN). But I think that

(a) Any syntactically correct Lisp expression could be unambiguously expressed using Polish notation.

(b) It would be straightforward to build a tool that would do so for any valid Lisp program (probably with lex and yacc or their successors).

(c) Adequate translation tools (either direction) could be hand-produced in reasonable time using Perl (or Python, which I do not know at all). My memory here is not necessarily reliable and therefore subject to correction.

Like my Logic instructor many years ago, I am not sure why anyone would want to do that, though.

Overall, this has been a pretty interesting thread, at least to me.

Regards.
Tom Dial

( ...)


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