NIL (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:32, 12 October 2006

Revision as of 21:36, 12 October 2006

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Concurrently with the effort to write NIL, a research group at [[Stanford University]] and

[[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]] headed by [[Richard P. Gabriel]] were investigating the design of a Lisp to run on the S-1 Mark IIA supercomputer. This project was never fully functional, but was a test bed for implmentedimplementing advanced compiler techniques isin a Lisp. Eventually the S-1 and NIL groups began to collaborate.

Although not succcessful as a project NIL was important in a number of ways, firstly it brought together [[Jon L. White]], [[Guy L. Steele, Jr.]] and Richard P. Gabriel, who were to later to go and define [[Common LISP]] <ref name=STEELE/>. Secondly Jonathan Rees worked on part of the NIL project during a year away from [[Yale University|Yale]]. On returning to Yale he was hired by the computer science department to write a new Lisp, which became the optimising, native code [[Scheme (programming language)|Scheme]] system known as [[T (programming language)|T]]. In part NIL begat this name, since "T is not NIL". <ref name=SHIVERS/>