Comment by Jtsummers

Comment by Jtsummers a day ago

3 replies

> I use "English Language" as a synonym for "Human Language".

That was unclear given you kept calling out English, and not natural or human language more broadly in the rest of your comment. But I'll go with it.

> all my words in the literal sense, everything I said is still literally true.

No, they aren't. You need to make a stronger case than "Because I declared it axiomatically true".

+ has become part of nearly every language already, what's the value of picking one word (add) from one language (English) to replace it? Or to be more generous to say that every language should substitute for + whatever their language's word is. Now they can't communicate without a translator. Or, they could just use + as has been done for centuries. Why make things harder on ourselves?

quantadev a day ago

The point about `(+ 1 2)` v.s. `1+2` is about the fact that the LISP syntax generalizes to all computations, whereas mathematical expressions do not. The beauty of LISP is that one simple syntax solves everything about computation in the axiomatically simplest way possible.

  • lproven 9 hours ago

    > one simple syntax solves everything about computation in the axiomatically simplest way possible.

    So what about RPN? What about Forth and Postscript? Just as simple... just as terse... just as efficient... just as general.

    And, for me, just as unreadable.

    • quantadev 8 hours ago

      I don't think RPN is as simple as parenthesis.

      All RPN does is replace the easy to get right parenthesis with difficult to get right newline characters.