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Concept
Maclisp
Summary
Maclisp (or MACLISP, sometimes styled MacLisp or MacLISP) is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp. It originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Project MAC (from which it derived its prefix) 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.
Maclisp is a descendant of Lisp 1.5. Maclisp departs from Lisp 1.5 by using a value cell to access and store the dynamic values of variables; Lisp 1.5 used a linear search of an association list to determine a variable's value. The Maclisp variable evaluation is faster but has different variable semantics. Maclisp also employed reader macros to make more readable input and output, termed input/output (I/O). Instead of entering (QUOTE A), one could enter 'A to get the same s-expression. Although both implementations put functions on the property list, Maclisp uses different syntax to define functions. Maclisp also has a load-on-demand feature.
Maclisp began on Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6 and PDP-10 computers running the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS); later it was ported to all other PDP-10 operating systems, for example, Timesharing / Total Operating System, TOPS-10 and TOPS-20. The original implementation was in assembly language, but a later implementation on Multics used PL/I. Maclisp developed considerably in its lifetime. Major features were added which in other language systems would typically correspond to major release numbers.
Maclisp was used to implement the Macsyma computer algebra system (CAS) or symbolic algebra program. Macsyma's development also drove several features in Maclisp. The SHRDLU blocks-world program was written in Maclisp, and so the language was in widespread use in the artificial intelligence (AI) research community through the early 1980s.
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