Lisp Machine Lisp

Lisp Machine Lisp
Family	Lisp
Designed by	David A. Moon,; Richard Stallman,; Daniel Weinreb
Developers	MIT,; Symbolics,; Lisp Machines,; Texas Instruments
First appeared	1976; 48 years ago
Implementation language	Lisp
Platform	Lisp machines
OS	Genera, others
Filename extensions	.lisp, .qfasl
Dialects
	Lisp Machine Lisp, ZetaLisp
Influenced by
	Lisp, Maclisp, Interlisp
Influenced
	Common Lisp

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

Lisp Machine Lisp 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.

Manual

The Lisp Machine Manual describes the Lisp Machine Lisp language in detail.^[1]^[2] The manual was popularly termed the Chine Nual, because the full title was printed across the front and back covers such that only those letters appeared on the front.^[3] This name is sometimes further abbreviated by blending the two words into Chinual.

Traits

Lisp Machine Lisp features include:

Support for object-oriented programming via an object system named Flavors
Uses dynamic binding, but supports closures with a special construct
Integer numbers were read and printed in octal (base 8) by default^[4]^[5]
Dividing floating point numbers returned decimals, dividing integers returned rational numbers (fractions)

References

^ Huebner, Hans, ed. (January 1984). "Lisp Machine Manual, Hypertext (6th) edition". GitHub. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
^ Moon, David; Stallman, Richard M.; Weinreb, Daniel (March 1981). "Lisp Machine Manual, 3rd Edition" (PDF). Bitsavers.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on September 6, 2008. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
^ "chine nual". Cool Jargon. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
^ "Page 3 of Lisp Machine Manual 3rd Edition" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on August 8, 2010.
^ "Currently the default radix for the Lisp Machine system is eight".