Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages

On Mon, 1 Apr 2024 08:32:48 -0000 (UTC), Muttley wrote:

Ugh. No wonder the language fell out of fashion. Looks like some kind of
hacked up Basic.

The BASIC comparison is just ignorant, but a lot of the ugliness comes
from the traditional “parenthesis pileup” layout. I prefer to write my
LISP code in a different way.

One of the key things about LISP is homoiconicity. That is, the language
explicitly includes an AST representation made out of objects defined in
the language itself. This allows for a robust token-based macro facility,
for example. Contrast this with the fiddliness and fragility of #define in
C and C++, for example.