[PRL] McCarthy's "pornographic programming"?

[Doug Orleans]

 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))

William D Clinger writes:
 > The latter.

Does anyone actually agree with McCarthy on this?

--Doug