9 Mar
2016
9 Mar
'16
5:13 a.m.
On 8 Mar 2016, at 19:43, John Cowan
<cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
They may not have been in the very earliest 1.5, but rather in one of the
many 1.5 and 1.6 offshoots (which are documented mostly, if at all,
in unsearchable PDFs), probably spelled inc and dec.
I am reasonably sure that they weren't in MACLISP (SETF is there) and fairly sure
also they were not in InterLisp. They do appear in Lisp Machine Lisp, so I would suspect
that this was how they found their way into CL.
However as soon as macros appeared (sometime shortly after Lisp 1.5 I think) things like
this become so easy to implement (in the usual cases at least: fully-fledged ones are
harder until SETF and its machinery exists, although that itself can be implemented with
macrology) that probably they appeared many times in programs informally before this
without anyone bothering to document them.
--tim