[PRL] McCarthy's "pornographic programming"?

[William D Clinger]

Doug Orleans quoting McCarthy:
>  >    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))

The latter.

Will