On 3/1/2013 9:32 AM, Andreas Eder wrote:
> Hi,
> i had a look at schatc.lisp and it look like '(schatchen e p)'
> would be the main entry point to the pattern matcher. But instead
> it isn't used anywhere in the code but m2 is called like '(m2 e p
> nil)'.
> That is exactly the definition if schatchen. That looks kind of
> strange to me. Does anyone happen to know why this is so?
>
> Andreas
Yes.
1. Joel Moses preferred a shorter name for the program that
he was typing many times. It also makes the text of the
source code shorter.
2. Nevertheless, he liked the name schatchen which is a Yiddish term for
a marriage broker or matchhmaker.
There are other puns in Moses' work. His thesis program on
symbolic integration was named SIN; partly a reaction to James
Slagle's earlier work called SAINT.
Anyway, Moses liked to title his lectures "Moses speaks on SIN"
(other insight into short program names..)
There was an advantage on the PDP-6/10 lisp system to keeping
your symbol names at 6 or fewer letters, since then the print
name fit in one 36-bit word and the symbol table would be
smaller.
Macsyma on the PDP 6 including the operating system, fit
an address space of 2^18 words each 36 bits.
Less than 1.2 megabytes.