Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!intercon!news
From: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Why a postscript language?
Message-ID: <1674@intercon.com>
Date: 3 Jan 90 16:09:42 GMT
References: <33444@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: news@intercon.com
Reply-To: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Lines: 20

In article <33444@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>, josh@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (Josh
Putnam) writes:
> Why is PostScript the way it is? Why not use a lisp-like language?
> Is it because of the simple implementation? Does a postscript language
> make page description easier?

One thing that PostScript has over Lisp is that it's very easy to do a
Forth-style threaded implementation.  Lisp storage allocation in particular
can be much more complex, and with only so much RAM to play with, a
stack-based threaded language can give you more "bang for the buck".
It's also marginally easier to generate from a program (unless that program
is written in Lisp :-)), which is nice for things like output drivers,
emulators, and so on.

Does anyone know what ever happened to LispScript?  It was a baby Lisp
interpreter that compiled into normal PostScript.

Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation
--