Lisp Machine Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, a direct descendant of Maclisp, and 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 3 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 (also known as the Chinual) describes the Lisp Machine Lisp language in detail.
Some Lisp Machine Lisp features:
- it supports object-oriented programming with Flavors
- it has dynamic binding, but supports closures with a special construct
- integer numbers were read and printed in base 8 by default
Famous quotes containing the words lisp and/or machine:
“Taught me my alphabet to say,
To lisp my very earliest word,”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)