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Re: Trivia question: What does the "G" in G-expressions stand for?


From: Sergiu Ivanov
Subject: Re: Trivia question: What does the "G" in G-expressions stand for?
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2022 18:15:04 +0200
User-agent: mu4e 1.8.9; emacs 28.1

"(" <paren@disroot.org> [2022-09-26T17:31:03+0200]:
> On Mon Sep 26, 2022 at 9:48 AM BST, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> No, it stands for “G”, just like the “s” in “s-expression” stands for
>> nothing (AFAIK).  :-)
>
> Don't quote me on this, but i'm pretty sure it originally stood
> for "symbolic" (so "symbolic expression").

I know that Wikipedia is not a scientifically sound source, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression

and in particular:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive/recursive.html

John McCarthy, Recursive Functions of *Symbolic Expressions* and Their
Computation by Machine

Now, this shows a relationship, but doesn't show direction/causality:
maybe somebody just invented "symbolic" for s, after s-expressions were
introduced :D

--
Sergiu



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