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At least half of those are on interpreters & compilers. Ever notice how compiler books that use C, Java, etc. usually have a 300 page tangent at the begging about automata theory, LALR parser generators, and so on? (PS, ever notice how many people never get through it?) Lispers can just use "(read)" and get on with life. They can skip a bunch of hard material upfront and hit the ground running.

It's good to know lexing & parsing techniques, but upfront? That's like writing a TCP/IP stack before you can do CGI scripting.

The same is equally true with many other languages, nowadays; one can use Erlang tuples, JSON, ML/Haskell type constructors, Lua tables, Python dicts & lists, etc. instead of s-expressions, but Lisp had a several-decade head start, so it (and to a lesser extent, ML) has a disproportionately large share of excellent compiler literature.



Lisp had a several-decade head start in many useful programming language features that are now commonplace (and some that aren't yet so commonplace).


Sure. Just like APL, Prolog, and others.




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