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Current hardware wouldn't contemplate supporting only a single, oddball (even then) language. (Although the C spec is carefully written to allow C-on-Lisp - e.

Current hardware wouldn't contemplate supporting only a single, oddball (even then) language. (Although the C spec is carefully written to allow C-on-Lisp - e.g. by making it illegal to compare pointers not pointing to the same array, allowing a C-"object"-per-Lisp-object implementation - real C code tends to make assumptions.)

lispm 12y ago
Symbolics sold ISO Pascal, C, Ada, Prolog and Fortran compilers for it. I've used TeX and the original MIT X11 server on a Lisp Machine.
- ScottBurson 12y ago
  My Zeta-C compiler predated Symbolics C by almost two years. One customer said they'd run millions of lines of code through it.
  - hga 12y ago
    So Symbolics' announcement of their vaporware C compiler didn't cost you all your sales? Good to hear that.
    - ScottBurson 12y ago
      It was a problem, as I recall, but not nearly as big a problem as the fact that people stopped buying the machines :-) Actually, it turned out -- though I never managed to communicate this to potential users -- Zeta-C and Symbolics C served different use cases. Symbolics C was best for porting entire C programs; Zeta-C was best if you had a library written in C and wanted to call it from Lisp.