[PRL] McCarthy's "pornographic programming"?

[Doug Orleans]

Doug Orleans writes:
 >    The unexpected appearance of an interpreter tended to freeze the
 >    form of the language, and some of the decisions made rather
 >    lightheartedly for the ``Recursive functions ...'' paper later
 >    proved unfortunate. These included the COND notation for
 >    conditional expressions which leads to an unnecessary depth of
 >    parentheses

Also, now that I think about it, I don't understand what he's saying
about COND.  Does he just wish that IF were primitive instead of COND,
or is he suggesting that

  (cond a b c d e f)

would be better than

  (cond (a b) (c d) (e f))

?

--Doug