3 ms·
The HLH Orion ran garbage collected Cambridge Lisp from fairly early in its development.
by rjsw 11y ago
The HLH Orion ran garbage collected Cambridge Lisp from fairly early in its development.
- arethuza 11y agoI wonder if they used their fancy bit-slice technology to change the CPU instruction set to be better suited for Lisp? [NB I am resisting the temptation to comment on the assertion that Lisp is a functional programming language! ;-)]
- rjsw 11y agoI think there were extra instructions for Lisp, it certainly ran the Gabriel Benchmarks faster than you would expect for the advertised clock speed. I only spent a day talking to John Fitch about the implementation and most of that was looking at his bindings to the GUI from Lisp. Cambridge Lisp was written in BCPL which was one of the languages provided with the machine so you probably wouldn't want to completely replace the instruction set.