Re: Lisp history: IF, etc.

Jeff Barnett <jbb@notatt.com> wrote or quoted:

Sir Walter Raleigh was the author of "The Lie"
Did the Queen know that Raleigh wrote "The Lie"?
might produce
Did the Queen know TRUE?

  This here thing might have some connection to what folks call
  "Extensionality": "To find the value of an expression,
  the only thing one needs to know about a subexpression is its
  (the subexpression's) value."

  Now, we can say with a high degree of certainty that natural
  language ain't got no truck with this "Extensionality" business,
  at least not the way ol' man McCarthy was demonstratin' it.

  The very idea that logical statements are a good fit for
  modellin' natural language utterances, and that these bad
  boys have some kind of "truth value" as their "meaning"?
  Hoo-wee, that's a real doozy, let me tell you!