newLISP_in_21_minutes.html, part 1

[Yussi]

Hello!



I've been going through the document newLISP_in_21_minutes.html at



     www.newlisp.org



It's a very nice quick review of some of newLISP features. Although this is not

one of those "or your money back" situations I have to inform you that it took

me considerably more than 21 minutes to go through it and I now understand that

the name was a joke in reference to all those "Learn X in Y minutes/hours/days/etc."



But I had fun and learnt a lot. Now I have some suggestions to make.



I tried to mail this text to the address jsmall@atlaol.net given in thedoc

but it's not valid any more.



I'm on a Win 10 machine and my newLISP is:



newLISP v.10.7.5 64-bit on Windows IPv4/6 libffi, options: newlisp -h



I've tried to copy relevant parts of the text to show the place I'm talking about.

The order is forward from start of text. OK, here goes:





Think of quote as taking its argument literally, i.e. symbolically.



> 'x

x

> (quote x)

' x                      <======= hyphen not shown in reality !!!

> '(1 2 three "four")

(1 2 three "four")

> _





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The symbols 'hello and 'world are bound in the current context to ...



shouldn't it be:



The symbols hello and world are bound in the current context to ...





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Let's rap up this section by seeing how to turn our example into a program.

===>

Let's wrap up this section by seeing how to turn our example into a program.





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After the Binding subheading:



Aren't setq and define macros and set a function?





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In this case the value 'x, a symbol, has been bound to the variable named y.



shouldn't it be:



In this case the value of 'x, the symbol x, has been bound to the variable named y.





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And of course y remains bound to 'x as shown above.

===>

And of course y remains bound to x as shown above.





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varible

===>

variable





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The rest of a empty list or a list with only one element is again the empty list

===>

The rest of an empty list or a list with only one element is the empty list

            ^^





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In the explanation of the recursive list-length function is

this sentence that I don't understand:



   Thus we could have simply tested a-list instead with the same effect.



Does it mean:



   Thus we were able to test a-list instead of using a Boolean expression





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The arguments 1 and 2 are superfluous.

===>

The argument 2 is superfluous and the argument value 1 for y is shadowed by the value 6 in setq.