On 3/3/2013 12:23 AM, Andreas Eder wrote:
> On 1 Mar 2013, Richard Fateman verbalised:
>
>> 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.
> But it would be even shorter, if m2 were a real alias for
> schatchen. Then you wouldn't need the third argument, which is
> always nil in the code. :-)
I think it is sometimes t rather than nil. but in any case it is
sometimes easier
to see optimizations afterwards. Moses was not the last person to go over
the code, so there may be other reasons.
For what it is worth, historically, the previous integration program by
Slagle
was written while Slagle was losing his vision. He had to write his lisp
code on punched cards (80 characters), and he had to balance parentheses
by feeling the holes with his fingers.
RJF