Re: (*) -> 1

[Jean Louis]

* tomas@tuxteam.de <tomas@tuxteam.de> [2023-01-17 19:45]:
> Higher maths are a superset of (and sometimes a correction of) what
> is taught in elementary schools. Lisp takes this inspiration from
> higher maths. John McCarthy [1] was a mathematician by training and
> most definitely had no qualms with zero- or one-term products and
> sums. You have no choice but (believe me, I studied that too). As
> soon as you have general sum and product formulae, you /need/ to
> define what happens in border cases, and those conventions you seem
> to dislike so much have turned out to be the most convenient,
> probably since the mid-19th century.

Thanks. I am following your hints, but I am not getting answer.

If you know why they are convenient, can you please explain me? That
is what I am asking.

By following your guidance, I have found McCarthy Lisp:

appleby/mccarthy-lisp: A toy lisp inspired by McCarthy's paper:
https://github.com/appleby/mccarthy-lisp

and I did not verify if that Lisp follows really McCarthy, but I git
pull-ed it and compiled, and did not find reference in McCarthy's
Lisp, because McCarthy says:

mclisp> (*)
Read Error: Expected start of Cons or Symbol, found: *


~/Programming/git/mccarthy-lisp
$ make
clang++ -I ./src -g -O3 -Wall -Wextra -std=c++11 src/main.cc -c -o src/main.o
clang++ -I ./src -g -O3 -Wall -Wextra -std=c++11 src/alloc.cc -c -o src/alloc.o
clang++ -I ./src -g -O3 -Wall -Wextra -std=c++11 src/cons.cc -c -o src/cons.o
clang++ -I ./src -g -O3 -Wall -Wextra -std=c++11 src/env.cc -c -o src/env.o
clang++ -I ./src -g -O3 -Wall -Wextra -std=c++11 src/error.cc -c -o src/error.o
clang++ -I ./src -g -O3 -Wall -Wextra -std=c++11 src/eval.cc -c -o src/eval.o
clang++ -I ./src -g -O3 -Wall -Wextra -std=c++11 src/init.cc -c -o src/init.o
clang++ -I ./src -g -O3 -Wall -Wextra -std=c++11 src/lexer.cc -c -o src/lexer.o
clang++ -I ./src -g -O3 -Wall -Wextra -std=c++11 src/load.cc -c -o src/load.o
clang++ -I ./src -g -O3 -Wall -Wextra -std=c++11 src/reader.cc -c -o 
src/reader.o
clang++ -I ./src -g -O3 -Wall -Wextra -std=c++11 src/utils.cc -c -o src/utils.o
clang++ src/main.o src/alloc.o src/cons.o src/env.o src/error.o src/eval.o 
src/init.o src/lexer.o src/load.o src/reader.o src/utils.o -o mclisp
~/Programming/git/mccarthy-lisp
$ ls
difftests.lisp  LICENSE  Makefile  mclisp*  mclisp.lisp  README.md  src/  test/ 
 test.lisp  TODO
~/Programming/git/mccarthy-lisp
$ ./mclisp
Loading mclisp.lisp... done.
mclisp> (*)
Read Error: Expected start of Cons or Symbol, found: *
mclisp> (-)
Read Error: Expected start of Cons or Symbol, found: -
mclisp> (+)
Read Error: Expected start of Cons or Symbol, found: +
mclisp> 

-- 
Jean

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