Lisp Machine Lisp

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

Lisp Machine Lisp itself 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.

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

Some Lisp Machine Lisp features:

• it supports object-oriented programming with Flavors
• it has dynamic binding, but supports closures with a special construct
• integer numbers were read and printed in base 8 by default
• division of floating point numbers returned decimals, division of integers returned rational numbers (fractions)

External links

• Lisp Machine Manual, 6th Edition, January 1984, Hypertext Version
• Lisp Machine Manual, 3rd Edition, March 1981