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I don't see it mentioned anywhere else. If someone gets a copy of VisiCalc and look at it in a hex editor, are there ways to tell that it's written in a Lisp?
by ralphc 2y ago
I don't see it mentioned anywhere else. If someone gets a copy of VisiCalc and look at it in a hex editor, are there ways to tell that it's written in a Lisp?
- whartung 2y agoYes. Apply common sense. Especially considering the state of Lisp back in the day, not to mention the utter lack computational power that a 1MHz 6502 has. It’s not even worth considering the concept of them writing in some high level proto-lisp that is cross compiled into 6502 from a larger machine. While a lot of software was cross assembled on larger hardware for microcomputers back in the day, almost nothing of note was written in a high level language. (To wit someone will mention things like the Canon Cat being written in a Forth dialect, which is why I said “almost”.)
- eichin 2y agoOr to hit more closely, in 1983 or so there was Grammatik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatik , a grammar-checking tool for CP/M (on Z80 so it had a little more power than the 6502) written entirely in Forth - I spent a bit of time prying an interpreter prompt out of it. Consider that the PDP-10 was effectively around 500khz, and the 704 that lisp was invented on (and gave us the CAR and CDR names) "could execute up to 12,000 floating-point additions per second". It was a couple of years before Pascal and C really caught on for micro development, but it really wasn't the barren wasteland of raw machine code that you seem to be suggesting...
- ralphc 2y agoLook up a couple of comments. From Dan Bricklin himself, "We wrote it in something we called IL, which is a Lisp derivative."