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by gumby 2549 days ago
> RPN FTW. Good ol' LISP. :)

Actually Lisp uses ordinary old polish notation. Reverse Polish Notation is used by stack-oriented systems like HP calculators and Forth.

1 comments

Not really; the motivating point of Łukasiewicz's notation was specifically to eliminate parentheses.
Well choosing between

(- (+ 1 2 3 4 5) 1)

and

- + + + + 1 2 3 4 5 1

The first one seems much more readable to me...

Lisp functions can take fewer or more than two arguments while many mathematical operators take only two.

And parentheses don’t serve precisely the same role in Lisp syntax than they in the more free-form world of maths.