On-line computation and simulation: The OPS-3 system: Greenberger, Jones, Morris and Ness: M.I.T. Press, 1965. $4.50
✍ Scribed by H.O. Asbury
- Book ID
- 102636977
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1967
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 119 KB
- Volume
- 4
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0005-1098
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Tw_s VOLUME presents in full almost all reports concerning the computer programming language LISP that was available in 1963, with the exception of the basic introductions and the programming manual by Prof. John McCarthy ("LISP 1.5 Programmers Manual" by John McCarthy et al, MIT Press 1962). The volume was produced by Information International, Inc. under a contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency with the aim of making the programming language LISP "more understood, more available, and more useful for programmers and mathematicians."
The language LISP is, as may be known, a remarkable and powerful language, because not only does it govern the operation of a computer, but it is a mathematical language with great flexibility and power for expressing processes in mathematics, logic, symbol manipulation and recursive fist processing.
This book fills a long observed gap in the documentation of the language LISP. The basic reference of LISP, the above-mentioned programmers manual is still necessary, but the first part of this book greatly facilitates the process of learning this programming language. The first part of the book contains two uncorrelated introductions, an extremely valuable set of exercises with solutions and two other helpful articles.
The second part contains eight papers on various subjects of the application-and implementation-of LISP. Two of these papers are of value to the possible implementer of a LISP-system on a new computer, one gives the LISP program for interpreting another well known string manipulating language, namely COMIT (with a few minor modifications), and the rest illuminate original ideas in the application of LISP to such fields as the checking of mathematical proofs, automation of inductive inference and computer language translation.
These papers serve very well to stimulate the reader to visualize other areas of intellectual work that may be formalized and automated with the aid of this language. The paper on the interpretation of COMIT (here called METEOR) represents a quick facility for the user of LISP to obtain the power of yet another language more suited to string pattern recognition than the basic LISP itself. This imbedding of COMIT into LISP is a unique facility developed by Dr. D. G. Bobrow.
The two articles on implementation will give the implementer of LISP several good ideas as will some of the appendices in the third part of the book.
The third part of the book consists mostly of LISP program listings which are very hard to read lacking completely integral comments (a fault of the LISP programming language).
For the researcher who will take up the work initiated by the papers in the second part, these listings are of course essential, but they are also valuable for the one who wants to run the LISP programs himself to verify the results. For the implementer of LISP aiming at a minimum system on a small computer the listing of a not quite standard (PDP-I) LISP interpreter itself in the MACRO symbolic machine language of Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-I may be of great value.
This book is an assembly of various articles and papers and is thus not very coherent as a book on the programming language LISP. One would believe that the language LISP deserved a more coherent presentation and that its value would be further acknowledged if this was the case. On the other hand, this book is a tremendous improvement in the documentation of LISP and may very well prove to be the only introduction and applications-documentation available before LISP 15 is made obsolete by the ALGOL-like language LISP II In spite of the misgivings, this book is highly recommended for those that want to learn more about LISP, those that are interested in Artificial Intelligence in general and those that are just curious how a program can be written for "Automatically Di~overing Interesting Relations in Data" as given in one of the advanced papers.