Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today. Only Fortran is older, by one year. Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history. Today, the best-known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Clojure, Common Lisp, and Scheme.
Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations. Despite being modest in number, Lisp machines commercially pioneered many now-commonplace technologies, including effective garbage collection, laser printing, windowing systems, computer mice, high-resolution bit-mapped raster graphics, computer graphic rendering, and networking innovations such as Chaosnet. Several firms built and sold Lisp machines in the 1980s: Symbolics, Lisp Machines Incorporated, Texas Instruments, and Xerox. The operating systems were written in Lisp Machine Lisp, Interlisp (Xerox), and later partly in Common Lisp.
Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon. Logo is not an acronym: the name was coined by Feurzeig while he was at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and derives from the Greek logos, meaning word or thought.
MACLISP is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp. It originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Project MAC in the late 1960s and was based on Lisp 1.5. Richard Greenblatt was the main developer of the original codebase for the PDP-6; Jon L. White was responsible for its later maintenance and development. The name Maclisp began being used in the early 1970s to distinguish it from other forks of PDP-6 Lisp, notably BBN Lisp.
MLISP is a variant of Lisp with an Algol-like syntax based on M-Expressions, which were the function syntax in the original description of Lisp by John McCarthy. McCarthy's M-expressions were never implemented.
MultiLisp is a functional programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp, and of its dialect Scheme, extended with constructs for parallel computing execution and shared memory. These extensions involve side effects, rendering MultiLisp nondeterministic. Along with its parallel-programming extensions, MultiLisp also had some unusual garbage collection and task scheduling algorithms. Like Scheme, MultiLisp was optimized for symbolic computing. Unlike some parallel programming languages, MultiLisp incorporated constructs for causing side effects and for explicitly introducing parallelism.
DWIM computer systems attempt to anticipate what users intend to do, correcting trivial errors automatically rather than blindly executing users' explicit but potentially incorrect inputs.
Wallace "Wally" Feurzeig was co-inventor, with Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, of the programming language Logo, and a well-known researcher in artificial intelligence (AI).
In computer programming, Franz Lisp is a discontinued Lisp programming language system written at the University of California, Berkeley by Professor Richard Fateman and several students, based largely on Maclisp and distributed with the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX minicomputer. Piggybacking on the popularity of the BSD package, Franz Lisp was probably the most widely distributed and used Lisp system of the 1970s and 1980s.
New Implementation of LISP (NIL) is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and intended to be the successor to the language Maclisp. It is a 32-bit implementation, and was in part a response to Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) VAX computer. The project was headed by Jon L White, with a stated goal of maintaining compatibility with MacLisp while fixing many of its problems.
CommonLoops is an early programming language which extended Common Lisp to include Object-oriented programming functionality and is a dynamic object system which differs from the OOP facilities found in static languages such as C++ or Java. Like New Flavors, CommonLoops supported multiple inheritance, generic functions and method combination. CommonLoops also supported multi-methods and made use of metaobjects. CommonLoops and New Flavors were the primary ancestors of CLOS. CommonLoops was supported by a portable implementation known as Portable CommonLoops (PCL) which ran on all Common Lisp implementations of the day.
Daniel Gureasko Bobrow was an American computer scientist who created an oft-cited artificial intelligence program STUDENT, with which he earned his PhD., worked at BBN Technologies (BBN), then was a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of the Palo Alto Research Center.
Warren Teitelman was an American computer scientist known for his work on programming environments and the invention and first implementation of concepts including Undo / Redo, spelling correction, advising, online help, and DWIM (Do What I Mean).
In Lisp programming languages, a fexpr is a function whose operands are passed to it without being evaluated. When a fexpr is called, only the body of the fexpr is evaluated; no other evaluations take place except when explicitly initiated by the fexpr. In contrast, when an ordinary Lisp function is called, the operands are evaluated automatically, and only the results of these evaluations are provided to the function; and when a (traditional) Lisp macro is called, the operands are passed in unevaluated, but whatever result the macro function returns is automatically evaluated.
The history of the programming language Scheme begins with the development of earlier members of the Lisp family of languages during the second half of the twentieth century. During the design and development period of Scheme, language designers Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman released an influential series of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI Memos known as the Lambda Papers (1975–1980). This resulted in the growth of popularity in the language and the era of standardization from 1990 onward. Much of the history of Scheme has been documented by the developers themselves.
TENEX was an operating system developed in 1969 by BBN for the PDP-10, which later formed the basis for Digital Equipment Corporation's TOPS-20 operating system.
Alice Hartley (1937-2017) was an American computer scientist and business woman. Hartley worked on several dialects of Lisp, implementing multiple parts of Interlisp, maintaining Macintosh Common Lisp, and developing concepts in computer science and programming language design still in use today.
