3 ms·
Yes. 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
by whartung 3y ago
Yes. 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 3y 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 3y agoLook up a couple of comments. From Dan Bricklin himself, "We wrote it in something we called IL, which is a Lisp derivative."