Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Looking for MACLSP
In-Reply-To: gsharp@primenet.com's message of Tue, 17 Jan 1995 19:41:51 MST
Message-ID: <aldersonD2MArJ.331@netcom.com>
Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com
Fcc: /u52/alderson/postings
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <gsharp.2.0030C335@primenet.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 1995 20:11:43 GMT
Lines: 35

In article <gsharp.2.0030C335@primenet.com> gsharp@primenet.com (Greg Sharp)
writes:

>I am looking for a version of Lisp called "MACLSP" - it was around in the 
>early seventies.  Is there a current flavor of Lisp that comes close to this 
>(has statements like "FEXPR" and "declare")?

Ah, MACLISP!  Filenames were constrained to be six characters long on all
PDP-10 operating systems (although Tops-20 eventually went to 39).  It was
available on ITS (MIT), WAITS (Stanford), TENEX, and Tops-20 for certain; I
simply don't know if it ran on Tops-10.  It was also available on Multics
(courtesy of Bernie G., I think).

I seem to recall that Franz Lisp started out as a port of MACLISP to Unix; it
may have had FEXPRs--yup, I just checked the first edition of _LISPcraft_ by
Wilensky, which used Franz, and FEXPRs are discussed on pg. 161.

FEXPR was the way to define what is called a "special form" in Common Lisp.

The usual reason given for the lack of FEXPR in Common Lisp is that the same
results can be achieved via macros, which MACLISP also had.

If it runs on Tops-10, perhaps Compu$erve has it available; I don't know if
they allow programming on their systems.

Otherwise, you're going to have to find a PDP-10 somewhere--I think they're
less rare than Multics boxen.  Try asking on alt.sys.pdp10 for pointers.

(We still have MACLISP on our in-house DEC-20, and it will certainly run on our
PDP-10 follow-on system, but that's a commercial proposition.)
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
