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This is also how the first ever Lisp implementation was made. Supposedly, McCarthy had never intended his definitions of EVAL and APPLY -- not in this "micro-m
by gjm11 16y ago
This is also how the first ever Lisp implementation was made.
Supposedly, McCarthy had never intended his definitions of EVAL and APPLY -- not in this "micro-manual", but in his original Lisp paper -- to be actually implemented. Some guy called S R Russell (I imagine him as a graduate student but have never checked) looked at the paper and thought "wait, we can type this code in, write a bit of supporting code, and get an actual Lisp implementation", and so history was made.
- JeanPierre 16y agoYeah, Steve Russell was a graduate student. Also, this is what McCarthy said during an interview: Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval..., and I said to him, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into [IBM] 704 machine code, fixing bugs, and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today.... (Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html - not really surprising)
- gruseom 16y agoNorvig has the best line about this: "So the first Lisp interpreter was the result of a programmer ignoring his boss's advice." (PAIP p. 777)
- gruseom 16y agoIt gets even better. Steve Russell went on to write the very first video game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!). I'd really like to know what else he did, and what he's doing now. The guy is a hero.