Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Andrew Dalke]

Daniel P. M. Silva:
> Do you know where I can find those studies?  I'm very intested in their
> findings :)

Sure.  The research was done for ABC.  ABC's home page is
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/abc/
    ABC is an interactive programming language and environment for
    personal computing, originally intended as a good replacement for
    BASIC. It was designed by first doing a task analysis of the
    programming task.

There's a publication list at
  http://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/abc/publications.html

Guido, the author of Python, was involved in that project.  For his
commentary on ABC's influence on Python see:
 http://www.python.org/doc/essays/foreword.html

> By the way, what's a non-professional programmer?

The people I generally work for.  Research scientists,
usually computational chemists and computational biologists,
who need to write code but don't consider themselves to be
software developers and haven't had more than a semester
or two of formal training and would rather do more science
then spend time reading books on language practice or
theory, even if by doing so it made them more productive
in the long run.

> Welcome to DrScheme, version 205.3-cvs1oct2003.
> Language: Pretty Big (includes MrEd and Advanced).
> > [first [list 1 2 3 '[4 5]]]
> 1

Indeed?  Well I just found a mention on Paul Graham's site
that he excluded [] over () because it didn't provide enough
directionality.

Again, where's the studies?  :)

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com