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From: Reuben_Bert_Mayo@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Virtues of Lisp syntax
Message-ID: <33709@cup.portal.com>
Date: 9 Sep 90 21:34:32 GMT
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Jay is referring to RLisp.  MLisp is yet another effort along the same lines.
RLisp used to be distributed with the REDUCE computer algebra package.  
(Maybe it still is; I haven't used Reduce lately.)  Portable Common Lisp was 
originally developed to support portability of Reduce.  RLisp was covered
in a chapter in the book by Organick, Forsythe, and Plummer, _Programming
Language Structures_, Academic Press (1978).

Personally I didn't find RLisp attractive.  A few control statements such as
IF..THEN were in Algol syntax, but the guts of the work still had to be done 
with Lisp 1.5-like functions, e.g. cons(car(a), b), so you felt like you 
were switching between two different languages within the same expression!


Scheme, now, _feels_ like Algol-60 (the world's sweetest version of Fortran),
and I'd say that feel is more important than look.
                       -- Bert