Gail Shaw wrote:
> "Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
> news:47839f0a$1@news.povray.org...
> http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/01/08/funny-pictures-is-fulla-starz/
>>>> http://www.xkcd.com/224/
>>> Huh? Related how?
>> "My God, it's full of CARs..." ;-)
> 
> The comic you linked to is titled Lisp, and wonders if god constructed the
> universe using lisp.
> 
> 
Perhaps you have not been subjected to LISP Gail.  (Apologies in advance 
if you have).

Two of the fundamental operations are taking the head item of a list 
using CAR and taking the remainder of the list using CDR.

Sounds complete nonsense until you learn that CAR stands for 'Contents 
of the Address Register' and CDR stands for 'Contents of the Decrement 
Register' and that LISP is from LISt Programming.  It is all about 
processing lists, including lists of data and lists of instructions. 
CAR and CDR were the assembler code mnemonics for the instructions that 
performed the operations on some ancient machine (IBM 704 ?).  Actually 
I think they may have been assembler macros that expanded into a few 
machine instructions each.  Anyway programmers used to write this stuff 
by hand.  Later LISP would translate the program text into the instructions.

Starter exercises in LISP are all about understanding what (CAR (CDR '(A 
B C))) returns.

So it is a neat pun and I had a chuckle at the cartoon.

Now I'm going to BXLE out of here.

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