It's now available the paper of the Medley talk Andrew Sengul gave at the European Lisp Symposium 2024. It outlines the history of Interlisp, introduces the Medley revival project, and presents the main features and facilities of the environment.
@amoroso#lisp#interlisp#commonlisp
Thanks for the pointer! That's a very well written paper giving an excellent overview of the Interlisp revival project.
@amoroso AI (and #Lisp history) in the new book by Masayuki Ida: "A Narrative History of Artificial Intelligence, The Perpetual Frontier of Information Technology"
A few years ago I have created a visual overview of (mostly) Common Lisp related books... Good thing: even the older ones can be useful, given that the core language hasn't changed that much over the last years.
@amoroso already ten or more years ago the few available used versions were offered for several hundred dollars. I have a copy, looks like an investment. ;-)
To assess how close Medley Common Lisp is to ANSI I ran on Medley the code of the book "Practical Common Lisp". Here are some notes on this project and my findings:
This series of posts by @sjl is a true gem worth bookmarking. It describes a CHIP-8 emulator in Common Lisp whose techniques are applicable to other systems.
But the series is also a Lisp software design resource in disguise, as it presents a Domain-Specific Language for concisely and clearly describing machine architectures and instruction sets.
I was cursious about Lucid Common Lisp but its remaining documentation is not under Lucid at @bitsavers because, of course, it's under Sun.
The product was a Sun branded implementation licensed from Lucid. It featured some interesting historical peculiarities such as the Flavors OOP system instead of CLOS, which in the mid 1980s was yet to come to the ANSI Common Lisp standardization effort.
@amoroso Lucic CL was available under that name from Lucid Inc. (incl. documentation), but it was also re-sold via OEMs like SUN, IBM, and several others. Sometimes they added things to it, like IDE or libraries. Later Harlequin acquired the rights of Lucid CL. It was then sold as Liquid Common Lisp, with newly added stuff like the CAPI GUI library and the Common LispWorks development environment. The manuals for Liquid CL are here: https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lcl.html
In 1984, 40 years ago, Digital Press published the book "Common LISP: Reference Manual" by Guy L. Steele Jr. and others, more widely known as the first edition of "Common Lisp: The Language" or CLtL1. It was an early major milestone of a Lisp standardization process completed a decade later.
@amoroso the "aluminum book", actually very well written and nicely typeset. The thing I did not like was the binding, that was breaking. The index has a lot of hidden jokes, as has the text.
@amoroso CLtL2 is confusing, since it is CLtL1 plus all the deltas to that date, towards ANSI Common Lisp -> this makes the text useful for updating CLtL1, but the language learner gets confused, because it shows the old dialect + the changes which adds up to the new dialect. A simple presentation of the new language version would have been less confusing in the long run.
@amoroso#commonlisp#lisp#cltl#cltl1#lispm#symbolics In Symbolics Genera we can switch the language in the REPL/Listener to CLtL. It then also advertizes only this in the features. We can then create a rough overview of the available symbols.
Coding in Common Lisp using the Medley Interlisp environment is subtly different from modern Lisp systems. In this post I explained why, and provided a suitable workflow which I hope makes some sense and helps newcomers:
@amoroso if you (load "foo.lisp") with package declarations and code. Does Medley create the packages? Does it let you the definitions edit in the IDE? Given that they implement CLtL1+, functions like LOAD and COMPILE-FILE are a part of the language. What are they doing?
@simon_brooke@mapcar@screwtape@nytpu@zoerhoff@jackdaniel the first offering of ACL of windows was a bit different from their UNIX product (Franz started in the UNIX world). After some time in the market they improved the Windows version.
@simon_brooke@mapcar@screwtape@nytpu@zoerhoff@jackdaniel TI had some interesting customers and applications. But the end of life was a shock for them. I don't think TI offered them anything. Other companies managed to help the Lisp customers to survive. Xerox had Envos taking over Interlisp. Apple had Digitool taking over MCL. Harlequin LispWorks later went a new independent company...
#pascal#modula2#oberon#lilith Niklaus Wirth passed away on 1st Jan 2024? I learned a lot by reading his books and by using Pascal & Modula 2 on the UCSD virtual machine on the Apple ][.
#lisp#lispmachine#symbolics#genera#pascal#niklauswirth Niklaus Wirth's PASCAL made it to unusual systems: Here is a screenshot of a Lisp Machine, browsing the original Pascal User Manual and Report, but in a hypertext browser, with a PASCAL implementation loaded...
"Common Lisp is not a beautiful crystal of programming language design. It's a scruffy workshop with a big pegboard wall of tools, a thin layer of sawdust on the floor, a filing cabinet in the office with a couple of drawers that open perpendicular to the rest, [...]"
"This historical baggage is a price paid to ensure Common Lisp had a future."
@lispi314@amoroso@simon_brooke a main problem at that time (decades ago) was that interpreted code and compiled code differed in bindings. Interpreter -> dynamic binding, compiler -> lexical binding, by default. That was changed by Scheme and later picked up by Common Lisp. Even in Common Lisp there are differences. When using an Interpreter, a macro can be evaluated at runtime and functions may get access to their source code and change it at runtime
