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)
“But a man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule him. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world. But it is found that the machine unmans the user. What he gains in making cloth, he loses in general power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)