Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!ut-sally!utah-cs!utah-orion!shebs
From: shebs@utah-orion.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: lisp (Compatibility with Lisp)
Message-ID: <173@utah-orion.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 4-Sep-87 12:13:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: utah-ori.173
Posted: Fri Sep  4 12:13:09 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 18:08:51 EDT
References: <855@tjalk.cs.vu.nl> <2683@hoptoad.uucp> <1519@sol.ARPA> <4776@sdcrdcf.UUCP> <1937@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Reply-To: shebs@orion.utah.edu.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs)
Organization: PASS Research Group
Lines: 29

In article <1937@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU> mac@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU (Alex Colvin) writes:

>> [...] Before common lisp, there was never any "official" standard.
>despite Utah's proclamation of "Standard", then "Portable Standard" Lisp.

Standard Lisp was proposed by Tony Hearn in a 1966 Sigplan Notices.  Dunno
if he was at Utah at the time, but in any case, this was only four years
after the appearance of McCarthy's JACM article.  The chief motivation for
Standard Lisp was to improve the transportability of the algebra system
Reduce, which is widely used by physicists and others.  To quote from "An
Overview of Common Lisp" (1982 Lisp conf proceedings, available from ACM):

"While promulgated as a possible standard, it was on the one hand incompatible
in one way or another with most other dialects, and on the other hand really
too small a subset of LISP for its adoption to have any practical effect.
However, even as a dialect used by only one implementation group, it deserves
the name "Standard" more than any other, as it has been implemented for a wide
variety of processors, and code written within that subset is completely
portable, a remarkable achievement."

(The crack about its being too small is a revealing insight into why Common
Lisp is big - Standard Lisp is about the size of Standard Scheme, though not
as clean.)

Portable Standard Lisp is more accurately named "Portable Implementation
of Standard Lisp", but that's a rather pedantic distinction.

							stan shebs
							shebs@cs.utah.edu