Enjoy the humor :-)

 ---- Forwarded Usenet-message ----
 From: "Pascal Costanza" <pc@p-cos.net>
 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
 Subject: Re: Lisp Logo Madness!
 Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 00:21:40 +0200
 URL: news://<3sfmjlFnv7dfU1@individual.net>

 drewc wrote:
 > Alan Crowe wrote:
 >
 >> drcode@gmail.com writes:
 >>
 >>> I have built a logo set that I hope can fill this void.
 >>> There's several logos in different shapes and styles all built around a
 >>> central design.
 >>>
 >>> http://www.lisperati.com/logo.html
 >>
 >> The creature is very cute, but I think he should have a
 >> fifth leg, to match having five eyes.
 >>
 >> Alan Crowe
 >> small rock
 >> 93 million miles out
 >  This is a popular newbie request. In Common Life is is trivial add such a
 leg, and if you look around it has been done before. While i might agree
 that it is a useful feature, it's not worth revising the standard simply
 because the legs and eyes don't match.

 It's actually an advantage that the numbers of eyes and legs don't match
 because this allows you to infer from just partial information what you
 are dealing with. So, say, you see the number 4 mentioned in your
 program source, you will immediately realize that this is about the
 legs. Vice versa, if you see the number 5, you know that this is about
 the eyes.

 Schemers think that it is an advantage that their language has exactly
 one leg and exactly one eye, and they claim that a hygienic organ system
 can help you disambiguate the possible confusions arising from this. So
 when you see a 1 mentioned, the organ system can infer from the lexical
 scope whether it is a leg or an eye. However, I think this just appeals
 to some weird mathematical aesthetics. The 4-legs-5-eyes system has been
 around for nearly half a decade now, and noone in the Lisp community
 really has ever had any problems with that.

 > You must be a troll.

 Don't be so harsh. There is a whole chapter in Peter Seibel's "Practical
 Common Life" in which the 4-legs-5-eyes system is explained, so it seems
 to be a real problem for newbies - at least for those coming from other
 languages.

  Pascal