Re: using Lisp in astronomical data analysis

[jwbaxter@halcyon.halcyon.com]

>The eighties?  Why the eighties? Lisp originated in the fifties, and was in
>widespread use when I first encountered it in the early seventies.

And, Lisp was a WHOLE LOT different when jobs were submitted on punched
cards for overnight turnaround (which with luck and staying up late meant
two turns per night at MIT's Computation Center, and its blazing fast IBM
704).  That early interpreter returned no results if there were not enough
)s, so it was pretty standard to stick about 3 or more cards of all right
parens on the end of a deck...it only gave a warning for excess ones, and
produced some sort of result which might (and might not) point towards a
missing paren in the real code.
   --John

--------------
John W. Baxter   jwbaxter@halcyon.com   My incorrect opinions are my
own...someone else probably supplied my one correct opinion.
I'd really rather be sailing.