this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Science Memes

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I dunno (infosec.pub)
submitted 3 weeks ago by LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children) 
(* (+ 2 5) (- 8 5))

Hope some LISP can clear this up

Edit:

( + 2 ( * 5 ( - 8 5 ) ) )
[–] yboutros 20 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Is this a meme? Shouldn't it be

( + 2 ( * 5 ( - 8 5 ) ) )
[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 weeks ago

Damn you are right haha.

Mine evals to 21.

[–] Reginald_T_Biter@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Explain yourself sir

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

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

[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah I'm stupid

[–] call_me_xale@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 weeks ago

Knowing is half the battle!

[–] Reginald_T_Biter@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago

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