4 ms·
IIRC the Lisp Machines supported C in addition to the system's dialect of Lisp.
by draven 12y ago
IIRC the Lisp Machines supported C in addition to the system's dialect of Lisp.
- cbd1984 12y ago> IIRC the Lisp Machines supported C in addition to the system's dialect of Lisp. IIRC the Lisp Machines (well, CADR at least) compiled code down to some pretty high-level machine code implemented in microcode. How many standard C idioms could actually be expressed in that kind of code? I'm also not seeing how it would give a speed-up, which is the usual reason to code in C. Was the C compiled to microcode?
- agumonkey 12y agoI think pjmlp showed some Lisp Machine bytecode and it was indeed taylored to lisp, and impractical for C semantics.
- tachyonbeam 12y agoNo reason you can't compile C down to that. It's just that there will be less of a clear performance advantage for C as some of the semantics will be slightly awkward to map to that instruction set. You might still get a speedup by writing C in some areas, but I think the real reason for supporting it is that you have a bunch of legacy software and drivers written in C, and it's easier to get a C compiler working on that platform than to port all that software.
- lispm 12y agoThe reason for C, Pascal etc. on the Lisp Machine was not speed. There were two reasons: 1) using the Genera development environment, where you could interactively/incrementally develop/debug C 2) using some C/Pascal software on a Lisp Machine. Examples were the MIT X11 server and TeX.
- pavelludiq 12y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_%28operating_system%29#Programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_%28operating_system%29#... So that's several variants of lisp, as well as fortran, c, pascal, prolog and ada. Thats pretty much most of the languages in use in the 80s.