Linux/Unix Acronyms...Answered by self!!!

[sgordon at kenan.com (Seth Gordon)]

"Kevin M. Gleason" wrote:

> ...what kind of lists would a LISP user be listing in an artificial
> intelligence lab?

LISP is not useful for lists _per se_; it's useful because:

(1) The "lists" can represent all sorts of arbitrary data structures.

(2) You don't have to explicitly allocate or deallocate memory, so it's easy to
write programs that deal with complicated and dynamically changing data
structures.

(3) Any LISP program can itself be represented as a list, which makes it easy
to have programs that write, scan, mutate, or interpret other programs.  It's
easy to write a prototype for a new dialect of LISP in an older dialect of
LISP.

All of these features were very useful for AI researchers, so AI folks
gravitated towards LISP.  Unfortunately, implementing all of those features
*efficiently* is difficult; when AI became commercially unpopular, LISP had a
reputation for being slow, and most developers outside the AI world avoided it.

For more information, see:
http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/lisp.html

--
perl -le"for(@w=(q[dm='r 0rJaa,u0cksthe';dc=967150;dz=~s/d/substrdm,\
(di+=dc%2?4:1)%=16,1ordi-2?'no':'Perl h'/e whiledc>>=1;printdz]))\
{s/d/chr(36)/eg;eval;}#In Windows type this all on 1 line w/o '\'s"
== seth gordon == sgordon at kenan.com == standard disclaimer ==
== documentation group, kenan systems corp., cambridge, ma ==


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