On 17 Jan 2008, at 12:31 pm, Achim Schneider wrote:
Lisp is actually not really meant to be compiled, but interpreted.
The "classic" Lisp is Lisp 1.5.
The Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual, published in I think 1961,
contains "Appendix D: The Lisp Compiler".
If I'm reading appendix G correctly, the compiler was under
4000 words of storage.
The
nice thing is that it doesn't need more than a handful of
primitives, a
list parser and heap manager/garbage collector and evaluator, which
all
can be implemented in under 1000 lines of C. Things get more involved
with get/cc, but then how many C programmers ever heard of setjmp...
I have no idea what get/cc might be, unless it is a mistake for call/cc,
but that's Scheme, not Lisp. "Classic" Lisp stack management wasn't
really
any harder than Pascal stack management (in part because classic
Lisps were
still struggling to get closures right).
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