CLASP is a really interesting project. For one, it's created and written by a Chemistry PhD researcher (Christian Schafmeister), not someone with a traditional

CLASP is a really interesting project. For one, it's created and written by a Chemistry PhD researcher (Christian Schafmeister), not someone with a traditional CS background. For another, it's one of the few languages that has ever attempted to interface with C++ at the template level - you can instantiate C++ template classes from CL, and catch C++ exceptions etc. For yet another, he does compacting garbage collection for the C++ objects used in the CL implementation, with pointer patching and everything else. There's a nice Google Tech Talk about it [0], that goes into both why he did this, and how he implemented this. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X69_42Mj-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X69_42Mj-g