Lisp Machine Lisp

Lisp Machine Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language. A direct descendant of Maclisp, it was initially developed in the mid to late 1970s as the systems programming language for the MIT Lisp machines. Lisp Machine Lisp was also the Lisp dialect with the most influence on the design of Common Lisp.

Lisp Machine Lisp itself branched into three dialects. Symbolics named their variant ZetaLisp. Lisp Machines, Inc. and later Texas Instruments (with the TI Explorer) would share a common code base, but their dialect of Lisp Machine Lisp would differ from the version maintained at the MIT AI Lab by Richard Stallman and others.

The Lisp Machine Manual describes the Lisp Machine Lisp language in detail. The manual was popularly known as the "Chine Nual", because the full title was printed across the front and back covers such that only those letters appeared on the front. This name is sometimes further abbreviated by blending the two words into "Chinual".

Some Lisp Machine Lisp features:

Lisp machine

Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language, usually through hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations. Despite being modest in number (perhaps 7,000 units total as of 1988), Lisp machines commercially pioneered many now-commonplace technologies – including effective garbage collection, laser printing, windowing systems, computer mice, high-resolution bit-mapped graphics, computer graphic rendering, and networking innovations like Chaosnet. Several companies built and sold Lisp Machines in the 1980s: Symbolics (3600, 3640, XL1200, MacIvory, and other models), Lisp Machines Incorporated (LMI Lambda), Texas Instruments (Explorer and MicroExplorer), and Xerox (Interlisp-D workstations). The operating systems were written in Lisp Machine Lisp, InterLisp (Xerox), and later partly in Common Lisp.

History