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by trwm 776 days ago
>This is of course true, but there's something very broken with lisp: metaprogramming and programming aren't the same thing,

Metaprogramming and programming are the same thing. It's just that no language, including all lisp, (but hilariously not m4) get quotation wrong. Lisp gets around this with macros which let you ignore quotation and deal with meta language statements expressed as object language statements when they clearly should not be.

This issue stems from the fact space in the object and meta language is treated as the termination of an atom without distinction between the two.

>Cognition is different in that it uses an antisyntax that is fully postfix. This has similarities with concatenative programming languages

Postfix languages are a dual of prefix languages and suffer from the same issue. You either need to define the arity of all symbols ahead of time and not use higher order functions or you need a pair of delimiters which can serialise a tree. Relying on an implicit zeroth order stack solved the problem in the same way a lobotomy solves depression.
3 comments
ret2pop 776 days ago
Thanks for your feedback! I'm not accusing you of not reading the full article, but you should if you haven't already. Also, we don't know the extent to which we made anything new; if you think you can do what we're doing in lisp in some way, you're free to prove us wrong.
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JonChesterfield 776 days ago
I'm pretty sure postfix and prefix encode the same space of languages. They parse to the same tree.
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rendaw 776 days ago
Do you have an example of quotation in lisp vs m4? I'm interested in what you asserted but I need something more concrete I think.
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hughesjj 776 days ago
> Relying on an implicit zeroth order stack solved the problem in the same way a lobotomy solves depression.

I mean, fair and flowery, but an implicit stack has been a thing ever since proto computers/calculators. Just like a lobotomy reduces the availability of higher order processing, so too does going back to the utmost primitives in calculating a string of instructions

https://www.hpmuseum.org/rpnvers.htm

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