this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 15 hours 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)

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 12 hours 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.

[–] call_me_xale@lemmy.zip 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 15 hours ago (1 children)
[–] call_me_xale@lemmy.zip 4 points 14 hours ago

Knowing is half the battle!

[–] Reginald_T_Biter@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago

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