> "seems you either don't know what lisp or you've never written mathematica"
Meanwhile, you brought up examples from Mathematica docs that talk about head/tails (car/cdr) but by that logic, Python is a Lisp too because you have:
list[0]
and
list[1:]
Maybe your Clojure/Racket experience wasn't enough to teach you what the essence of Lisp was. From your first link:
"Mathematica expressions are in many respects like LISP lists. In Mathematica, however, expressions are the lowest-level objects accessible to the user. LISP allows you to go below lists, and access the binary trees from which they are built."
That right there is telling you that Mathematica is not a Lisp.
I'm sorry but are you really going to pretend like car and cdr are not core to lisp?
>list[0] and list[-1]
That is not car and cdr; closer would be list[0] and list[1:] if lists were cons in python.
>Mathematica expressions are in many respects like LISP lists. In Mathematica, however, expressions are the lowest-level objects accessible to the user. LISP allows you to go below lists, and access the binary trees from which they are built
This is a quote from 1986. I wonder if the language has changed much since then
Meanwhile, you brought up examples from Mathematica docs that talk about head/tails (car/cdr) but by that logic, Python is a Lisp too because you have:
and Maybe your Clojure/Racket experience wasn't enough to teach you what the essence of Lisp was. From your first link:"Mathematica expressions are in many respects like LISP lists. In Mathematica, however, expressions are the lowest-level objects accessible to the user. LISP allows you to go below lists, and access the binary trees from which they are built."
That right there is telling you that Mathematica is not a Lisp.
Edit: Corrected the Python list example.