this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)
(* (+ 2 5) (- 8 5))

Hope some LISP can clear this up

Edit:

( + 2 ( * 5 ( - 8 5 ) ) )
[–] yboutros@infosec.pub 21 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Is this a meme? Shouldn't it be

( + 2 ( * 5 ( - 8 5 ) ) )
[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 month ago

Damn you are right haha.

Mine evals to 21.

[–] Reginald_T_Biter@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 month ago (3 children)

This is called "prefix notation". The operator comes before the operands and every expression goes in parentheses.

For instance you could write:

(+ 1 2 3 4)

Which would evaluate to 10.

This syntax is from a family of programming languages usually called LISP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)

[–] call_me_xale@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I understand prefix notation, but you got the order of operations wrong...

[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] call_me_xale@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 month ago

Knowing is half the battle!

[–] Reginald_T_Biter@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Awesome thanks for explaining that. That's cool as hell.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago

Also, you can use this for more than just arithmetic. The first thing in the list is the name of the function, and everything else is something that you pass to the function. So you could instead write

(plus 1 2 3 4)

Which would be like plus(1, 2, 3, 4) in other kinds of programming languages.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

So, if 2 5 8 5 - × + is "RPN" does that mean that the LISP version is Polish Notation?