16 Feb
2018
16 Feb
'18
7:06 a.m.
The whole reason VM was developed at UCB was because Ernie (the original) Vax was funded
to develop the ability to port MacLisp and more importantly Macsyma from ITS.
V32’s static address space was not going to work.
Btw the program we used to debug the VM system on the original mc500 was macsyma’s
competition, sms (which would later become wolfram).
In both cases the idea was to ensure the memory system was being exercised.
Clem
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
On Feb 15, 2018, at 7:51 PM, Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 7:01 PM, Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Wed, 14 Feb 2018, Toby Thain wrote:
I know about LISP (and even used it); it's on my history list.
Actually, I can't think of any language that derived exclusively from LISP (other
than Scheme etc)... Oh, and EMACS :-)
There were (and are!) a whole bunch of dialects of Lisp: Common Lisp and Scheme might be
the best known, with Clojure a modern entrant. Arc is sort of a thing. Most folks know
about emacs Lisp. All of these derive from the original Lisp.
But there were a whole slew of historical dialects descended from Lisp 1.5: MacLisp,
InterLisp, FranzLisp, Lisp Machine Lisp, the original variant implemented by Symbolics
before they adopted Common Lisp, Portable Standard Lisp...and any number of others that
were implemented as extension languages: AutoLisp from AutoCAD, the aforementioned Emacs
Lisp, the pseudo-Lisp from Gosling's Emacs, and plenty of others. And how about
implementations? VAX Lisp, LispWorks, Allegro, etc. I think the thing is that
"Lisp" isn't a single language, but rather a family of languages that all
share common features (code is data, macros, etc, etc, etc) with lots of variation between
them (I understand that there was serious argument about whether integer literals should
be written in octal in Common Lisp, as they were in MacLisp. Somehow common sense
prevailed).
So, how's this relevant to Unix? Well, I'd like to know more about the
historical interplay between the Unix and Lisp communities. What about the Lisp done at
Berkeley on the VAX (Franz Lisp).
One of the things that strikes me about Lisp and Unix is the conceptual similarity
between image based languages (like Lisp) with a REPL and the Unix "process as
virtual machine" model with a shell and set of utilities. An image is a sort of
virtual machine and a REPL is a sort of shell; callable functions in the REPL are sort of
like discrete programs in the $PATH. To a first order approximation, at any rate.
So anyway...some of you who were there, was there cross-pollination? Was Franz Lisp a
thing Unix people at Berkeley played with, or was it mostly Lisp people who just happened
to be using Unix because VAXen were expensive?
- Dan C.
ALGOL,
one of the most influential languages ever, with just about every programming language in
use today tracing its roots to it.
Worth mentioning one significant exception: the Lisp family.