MACLISP
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Revision as of 07:33, 22 March 2023 by Larsbrinkhoff (talk | contribs) (Macsyma service on Arpanet.)
Influential dialect of LISP. Developed initially as the standalone PDP-6 LISP at Project MAC, then moved to ITS and renamed MACLISP somewhere along the way. Later ported to TOPS-10, WAITS, TOPS-20, and Multics.
The MACLISP application Macsyma was so important to the research community a consortium was formed to buy a KL10 to offer it as a service on the ARPANET. When the aging PDP-10 hardware was falling behind, new MACLISP-compatible implementations were written and Macsyma was brought up on those.
MACLISP was used to bootstrap other LISP dialects: the Lisp Machine software, Scheme, and CMU's Spice Lisp.
Descendants include Lisp Machine Lisp, NIL, Franz Lisp, Common Lisp, and Emacs Lisp.
