Claim · 1960-04 · publication · Stated in source · Supported

McCarthy (1960) states that LISP was designed to facilitate experiments with the Advice Taker and that it came to be based on a scheme for representing partial recursive functions of a class of symbolic expressions.

One recorded claim. The claim panel gives its qualification, the source passages with their place in each source, and how it was checked.

What it connects

Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I → discusses →

Where it appears

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Claim and evidence

Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part Idiscusses ↓

Machine-checked, not reviewed by an editorStated in sourceSupported

Supporting evidence: primary · 1 source

Date: 1960-04 · publication Records dated 1960 →

Scope and limitsDescription from the author's later copy 'with minor notational changes' from the CACM printing.

The evidence 01

primary sourceSupports the claim

Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I

Author's site (www-formal.stanford.edu) · 1960-04

Cite the original source

Cite the original document, not Selekoa. Check these details against it.

Source excerpt

“eventually came to be based on a scheme for representing the partial recursive functions of a certain class of symbolic expressions.”

Location in source PDF p. 1, section 1, Introduction

How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher

Machine-checked · 2026-10-31

Source details and check notes

Authors: John McCarthy
Version: Retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-10-29 (SHA-256 3d981849e59505eff3f14397a177b409f5d978d43d114bdd67c956e74320fc92). LaTeX copy on the author's site, 'Copied with minor notational changes from CACM, April 1960'
Canonical address: Open the canonical source ↗
Accessed: 2026-10-29
Language: English (en)
Attribution: John McCarthy, “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I”, 1960-04.
Reuse: No open redistribution licence asserted. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each). Recheck terms before wider redistribution.
Check notes: Candidate pack passage, Kinds of AI and technical history (research/technical-history). The quotation (21 words) matched the text retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-10-29. Matching ignored differences of whitespace, case, quotation marks, dashes, PDF line-break hyphens and Unicode compatibility forms, so the source’s typography can differ. No human editorial review.

Status and meaning

Editorial status. Not reviewed by an editor. An exploratory record that no editor has accepted. This status does not say whether a person has read any linked passage. Each evidence record above shows how it was checked.

Relation. The concept is explicitly discussed in the document. This makes no earliest-use, invention or transmission claim.

Date. Date of publication, as the source gives it.

Record ID th-sym-desc-mccarthy-1960-lisp