And the other legacy? An undeniable grace, beauty, and power. As a Lisp programmer continued to link simpler functions into more complex ones, he or she would eventually reach a point where the whole program was a function—which, of course, would also be just another list. So to execute that program, the programmer would simply give a command for the list to evaluate itself in the context of all the definitions that had gone before. And in a truly spectacular exercise in self-reference, it would do precisely that. In effect, such a list provided the purest possible embodiment of John von
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