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Marvin Minsky - The Beauty of the Lisp Language

23 2020-10-04 10:22 *

>>20,21
You cannot give Brainfuck a syntax that would make it pleasant to use. Of course you could argue that since C can be compiled to Brainfuck, it is a syntax for it, but this is wrong. Programming languages have this little thing called "semantics", that describe the meaning of programs. Syntactic sugar does not change semantics, but linguistic abstraction does. Lisp macros are different from C macros precisely because they can be used for linguistic abstraction, while C macros are limited to syntactic sugar.

You could of course still claim that C can be extended in the same way by using custom preprocessors or extensions to the compiler. But the difference is that in Lisp these are part of the program, while in C they are separate things. Which is why one could claim that Lisp has an "open future", because it can be extended from inside, while most other languages can only be extended externally.

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