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Common Lisp Description

Common Lisp is the commercially-dominant member of the Lisp family of programming languages. The family traces its roots back to professor John McCarthy who, while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1950s, invented Lisp as a mathematical notation to describe "recursive functions of symbolic expressions." A couple years later Steve Russell, a student of McCarthy, noticed that McCarthy's notation would be easy to interpret using a computer program -- thus was born the Lisp programming language.

From that humble beginning, Lisp grew and matured. In the 1970s and 1980s, an entire computer industry grew, flourished, and -- eventually -- withered around the concept of building machines to directly execute Lisp programs. These machines, the "Lisp Machines" (abbreviated to "LispMs"), had highly advanced windowing systems, networked operating systems, and integrated development environments; the eventual demise of the LispM industry plunged software development back to the "dark ages" by the reckoning of those who had the good fortune to work with LispMs.

Even as LispMs faded from the scene, other forces were at work to bring efficient Lisp compilers to conventional, or "stock", computer hardware. A number of very good compilers emerged from the research laboratories, and academic entrepeneurs started businesses -- some of which are still thriving -- marketing these Lisp compilers for stock hardware.

Meanwhile, the government agencies responsible for most of this funding created a project to merge the best of the competing dialects. An initial draft of this Common Lisp language specification emerged in 1984. Ten years later, after painstaking review and fine-tuning by vendors and users alike, the specification was formalized by the American National Standards Institute.

Common Lisp was the first-ever object-oriented language to have been standardized. It's important to note that CLOS, the object-oriented portion of Common Lisp, had been widely implemented, used, and refined for many years, and was quite stable and well understood when the Common Lisp standard was finally approved.

MCL and Macintosh Common Lisp are trademarks of Digitool, Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, and Macintosh are trademarks of Apple Computer. All other trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners. Last update: Sat, Mar 06 1999 at 16:34:59