Lisp (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 09:50, 30 August 2002

Revision as of 02:27, 1 September 2002

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=== Lisp History ===

LispLISP was invented by [[John McCarthy]] in [[1958]] while he was at [[MIT]]. McCarthy published a paper in [[CACM]] in [[1960]], entitled "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I" (part II was never published.) Lisp was originally implementated on an [[IBM 704]] computer, and two instructions on that machine became the primitive Lisp operations for decomposing lists: <code>car</code> (Contents of Address Register) and <code>cdr</code> (Contents of Decrement Register). Even today, the Lisp operations for returning the first item in a list and the rest of the list are named <code>car</code> and <code>cdr</code> respectively.

Because of its expressiveness and flexibility, Lisp became popular with the [[artificial intelligence]] community. However, Lisp had its downsides as well: Lisp program generate a large amount of intermediate output, which take up memory and have to be [[garbage collection|garbage collected]]. This made it difficult to run Lisp on stock hardware. In the [[1970s]], an increasing user community and generous government funding led to the creation of [[Lisp machine|Lisp machines]]: dedicated hardware for running Lisp programs.