I assume that there were two completely different CMLisp/StarLisp implementations as the language described by Hillis' disertation and StarLisp paper (ie. with

I assume that there were two completely different CMLisp/StarLisp implementations as the language described by Hillis' disertation and StarLisp paper (ie. with xexctors and xaps) is significantly different in the overall design from the StarLisp as described in CM-2 manuals and as implemented by the Common Lisp CM SDK (it can be found somewhere on the internet and works in SBCL). The newer version is significantly lower-level and does not have the xector concept (and its design is similar to C and Fortran APIs for CM). I feel that the reason for this change was to make collective communication operations more explicit, probably because the store-and-forward communication network of CM-1/2 isn't exactly fast at doing arbitrary global permutations.