December 2021
Beginner
840 pages
47h 29m
English
Content preview from Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation
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5.17 Notes and Further Reading
John McCarthy, the original designer of Lisp, received the ACM A. M. Turing Award in 1971 for contributions to artificial intelligence, including the creation of Lisp. For a detailed account of the history of Lisp we refer readers to McCarthy (1981). For a concise introduction to Lisp, we refer readers to Sussman, Steele, and Gabriel (1993).
In his 1978 Turing Award paper, John Backus described how the style of functional programming embraced by a language called FP is different from languages based on the λ-calculus:
An FP system is based on the use of a fixed set of combining forms called functional forms. These, plus simple definitions, are the only means of building new functions from existing ones; they use ...