Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Oh wow. 42 years later, it still exists:
>
> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD215.PDF
>
> "Go to considered harmful."

a classic!  I'm glad you've been interested in the evolution of programming
formalisms -- and all by yourself!  Next on, the lambda papers! ;)

> I also note, with some interest, what looks suspiciously like Haskell
> syntax, in a letter typed 42 years ago. Obviously it's not after
> Haskell, but rather whatever mathematical formalism Haskell borrowed the
> notation from. Still, interesting none the less...)

bwahahahaha

you must be talking about `conditional expressions as introduced by J.McCarthy
("B1 -> E1, B2 -> E2,....., Bn -> En")'... although it looks like currying
haskell notation, it's actually what it's told:  John McCarthy's conditional
expressions for Lisp!

(cond
  ((null? ls) 0)
  ((zero? (car ls)) 0)
  (#t (/ n (car ls))))

cond was blowderized and adapted to all other programming languages in the
simplified form if-then-else... even Lisp provides it as well as cond!

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