> common lisp that brought together many of the academic and commercial variants in use at the time Common Lisp was mainly designed to be a common successor to

> common lisp that brought together many of the academic and commercial variants in use at the time Common Lisp was mainly designed to be a common successor to Maclisp, replacing Spice Lisp, NIL, Lisp Machine Lisp, S-1 Lisp. Those were all relatively similar Maclisp descendants. > Commercial and academic lisps and a standard merging them was necessarily large. Common Lisp is large, because it is based mostly on Lisp Machine Lisp (aka ZetaLisp), which was already large. Which was an expanded version of Maclisp - which was already large. Lisp Machine Lisp was simply the Maclisp successor with the most work put in already. Stuff like pathnames also came from Lisp Machine Lisp, where the Lisp-written OS interfaced to several outside systems with different pathnames. It was thought to be useful in portable code, since Common Lisp code should run on many different operating systems with different file systems. > Scheme never aspired to that R6RS Scheme and R7RS Scheme Large were/are attempts to standardize slightly larger portions of the Scheme language.