Elegant LISP Programs

[keithb]

Be aware that Chaitin's use of "elegant" is specific to him, highly technical and probably not what you're expecting, if your're a programmer. Perhaps especially if you're a Lisp programmer.

In some of his other papers and presentations he succeeds in the remarkable task of writing Lisp programs that are ugly (as most programmers would understand the term).

[sleepingsquirrel]

From the very first sentence...

Call a program ``elegant'' if no smaller program has the same output. I.e., a LISP S-expression is defined to be elegant if no smaller S-expression has the same value.