4 ms·
The MIT Lisp Machine didn't have lisp primitives in hardware. It had two extra hardware features, it could fetch two 16bit instructions at a time, and a fast mu
by rjsw 8y ago
The MIT Lisp Machine didn't have lisp primitives in hardware. It had two extra hardware features, it could fetch two 16bit instructions at a time, and a fast multi-way branch instruction. Other than that it looked very much like a modern RISC architecture.
I would say that the main feature of a Lisp Machine is that you do everything from within Lisp.
- lispm 8y agoThe architecture the developer saw on a Lisp Machine like a Symbolics was tagged, 36 or 40 bit, mostly stack oriented and had lots of primitive Lisp functionality, type checking /dispatching, some GC support, etc.
- rjsw 8y agoThat was all done in software on the MIT/LMI/TI machines. I don't know of any papers on the Symbolics hardware that are not behind the ACM paywall, how much did it really differ from the other Lisp Machines ?
- pinewurst 8y agoTry https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron/courses/cs252-F00/handouts/papers/symbolics.pdf https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron/courses/cs252-F00...
- lispm 8y agoTI https://3e8.org/pub/scheme/doc/lisp-pointers/v1i6/p13-dussud.pdf https://3e8.org/pub/scheme/doc/lisp-pointers/v1i6/p13-dussud...
- mruts 8y agoIf that was the case, why are we talking about lisp machines vs a lisp OS?