Starting on page 154 a now-familiar new product is introduced, and compared to Lisp as such: > Returning to the LISP theme of our current issue, Visi- Calc is

Starting on page 154 a now-familiar new product is introduced, and compared to Lisp as such: > Returning to the LISP theme of our current issue, Visi- Calc is an example of a tree-oriented parallel data struc- turing problem for which LISP is a most appropriate lan- guage of expression. Due to a lack of availability of LISP as a software development tool for personal computing hardware, its authors did not use LISP. They also had to make a number of compromises and tradeoffs as a result of the small size (eg: 16 K to 48 K bytes) of the main memory of personal computers. But they did use many of the tree concepts of artificial intelligence research. This provides us with the ultimate example of the relevance of LISP-like languages and approaches to personal computing: one of the most generally useful new user software tools for small machines, Visi-Calc, tackles just the sort of problem for which LISP is an appropriate tool of expression.