Joe Marshall wrote:
> ······@truevine.net (neo88) writes:
> > I wondered if it would be possible to do a few things with this
> > apparent advantage of Lisp.
> >
> > 1) Cons cells - Since I know that cons cells are the lowest form of
Lisp
> > that is actually what we can call Lisp, I was wondering if it was
possible
> > to stop the translation of cons cells into machine form.
>
> What is that supposed to mean? Lisp is a language, cons cells are
> data structures. Who is translating cons cells to machine form?
>
> > 2) This said, is it possible to create a machine that manipulates
> > symbols only?
>
> Yes. But why would you want to?
Perhaps he wishes the code-is-data nature of lisp to persist to
runtime, as section 3.2 of this paper hints at?
http://www.cs.uni-bonn.de/~costanza/lisp-ecoop/submissions/Burger.pdf
He didn't actually give this lecture at the conference (too bad, that
was a talk I definitely wanted to see), and I haven't tried Pico Lisp
out, but this sounds vaguely relevant.
MfG,
Tayssir