Lisp systems in the 1990s
D. Kevin Layer, Chris Richardson · Communications of the ACM · 1991
isp was designed by John McCarthy and implemented in the late 1950s at MIT. Designed to manipulate symbolic rather than numeric data, Lisp became very popular with the research community, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence and computer-aided design.Programming in Lisp includes the following benefits:• Lisp provides an interactive program development environment; • Lisp allows incremental compilation; • Lisp provides automatic memory management; and • Lisp is an extensible language, allowing applicationspecific customization.Over the past 30 years a variety of Lisp dialects have been developed, including MacLisp [22], ZetaLisp [36], Franz Lisp [10], Portable Standard Lisp [14] and InterLisp [34] to mention just a few.The latest dialect of Lisp--Common Lisp [31]--is in the process of being standardized by the ANSI subcommittee X3J13.(The standard has gone through many stages of review and is now being written in specification form.)Common Lisp is very different from the original version of Lisp and is a rich, sophisticated language providing functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming.Lisp was originally implemented on an IBM 709.The first highperformance Lisp implementation was MacLisp on a PDP-10 [30] with special-purpose Lisp machines developed during the 1970s at MIT and Xerox PARC to follow.Lisp machines provide hardware support for Lisp and can run large applications effectively.They became commercially available during the late 1970s and early 1980s and offered high-productivity programming environments which are unsurpassed in terms of their richness and sophistication even today.The mid-1980s saw the development of high-performance Lisp systems on stock hardware, and today Lisp has been implemented efficiently on workstations, personal computers and mainframes.This article describes the features that can be found in a modern Common Lisp system--including programming environments, object-oriented language extensions, integration with programs written in other langauges, and a method for delivery of applications written in Lisp.Additionally, this article outlines some of the possible future developments of Lisp which include: