Tag: newlisp

History of LISP

“The goal of this project is to collect, preserve, and present source code, design documents, and other materials concerning the original LISP I/1.5 system, and as many of its follow-ons as possible. LISP was one of the earliest high-level programming languages and introduced many ideas such as garbage collection, recursive functions, symbolic expressions, and dynamic type-checking; it is still in use. This is a project of the Computer History Museum‘s Software Preservation Group. The editor appreciates comments, suggestions, and donations of additional materials…”

http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/

Is LISP still useful in today’s world? Which version is most used?

“I try to teach myself a new programming language in regular intervals of time. Recently, I’ve read how Lisp and its dialects are at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from languages like C/C++, which made me curious enough to know more about it. However, two things are unclear to me, and I’m looking for guidance on them :

  1. Is LISP still practiced/used in todays world, or is it a legacy language like FORTRAN/COBOL ? I mean, apart from maintaining existing code, is it used on new projects at all ?
  2. What is the most widely used dialect ? I came across Scheme and Common Lisp as the 2 most prevalent dialects, and wanted your opinion as to which is the most favored/useful one to learn – and would be immensely gratified if you can suggest any resources for a rank beginner to start from.

While eager to learn a language which is fundamentally different from the procedural languages I’m used to, I don’t want to invest undue effort in something if its totally obsolete – I’d still learn it if it was professionally “dead”, but only with an academic perspective…”

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/55284/is-lisp-still-useful-in-todays-world-which-version-is-most-used

Does newLISP use garbage collection?

“Memory management in newLISP does not rely on a garbage collection algorithm. Memory is not marked or reference-counted. Instead, a decision whether to delete a newly created memory object is made right after the memory object is created. newLISP follows a one reference only (ORO) rule. Every memory object not referenced by a symbol is obsolete once newLISP reaches a higher evaluation level during expression evaluation. Objects in newLISP (excluding symbols and contexts) are passed by value copy to other user-defined functions. As a result, each newLISP object only requires one reference…”

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11189869/does-newlisp-use-garbage-collection