Lisp history

 

     The origins of Lisp date back to 1956, when a summer research meeting on artificial intelligence was held at Dartmouth College.  At the meeting, John McCarthy learned about a technique called ‘‘list processing’’ that Allen

Newell, J. C. Shaw, and Herbert Simon had developed.  Most programming in the 1950s was done in assembly language, a primitive language defined directly by the circuitry of the computer.  Newell, Shaw, and Simon had

created something more abstract, called IPL (for Information Processing Language), that manipulated symbols and lists, two important datatypes in artificial intelligence programming.  But IPL’s syntax was similar to (and as akward as) assembly language.

Elsewhere in the 1975s a new language called FORTRAN was being developed. FORTRAN was designed for the sort of numericla calculations that are common in scientific computing. It allowed the programmer to think in terms of algebraic(代数的） expressions such as A = (X+Y)*Z instead of writing assembly language instructions. The idea that programmers should express their ideas in familiar mathematical notation, and the computer should be the one to 

translate these expressions into assembly language, was a radicala innovation.It made FORTRAN  a powerful numerical computing language. McCarthy wanted to build an equally powerful language for symbolic computing.

One approach he suggested was to build on top of FORTRAN, by creating  a set of special subroutines for list

manipulation. This idea was pursued by Herbert  Gelerntner and Carl Gerberich at IBM , and was called  FLPL, for

FORTRAN List Programming Language. But McCarthy himself, working first at Dartmouth and later at the  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designed a new language, LISP(for LISt processor), that drew on ideas from

IPL, FORTRAN, and FLPL. The first version, Lisp 1, was developed for the IBM 704 computer.

Lisp 1.5 was the first lisp dialect to be widely used. The lisp 1.5 Programming's Manual by McCarthy et al.appeared in 1962.By 1964 Lisp was running on serveral types of computers, including an IBM 7094 cnder MIT's Compatible Timesharing System; it was thus one of the first interactive programming language. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) also played a prominent role in Lisp's history. One of the early Lisp implemetations ran on its first computer, the PDP-1. The PDP-6 and PDP-10(later DECSytem-20) computers were specifically designed to implement Lisp efficiently.

After the mid-1960s,Lisp implementations began to diverge(分歧).