Re: Lisp history: IF, etc.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

[Lisp 2] That project was considered a “failure”, but I wonder why?
Did it turn out that getting rid of the (ahem) quirky Lisp syntax in
fact got rid of some of its expressive power, too?

This retrospective (8 page PDF) gives the impression that Lisp 2 bogged
down due to the implementation outstripping the limited computers
available at the time.  Plus, Lisp 1.5 had gotten entrenched enough that
Lisp 2's Algol-like syntax didn't excite people any more:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8267589

Lisp 2 had an interesting GC scheme that migrated into SPITBOL which is
where I learned about it.  It was a mark-sweep GC but had a
"generational" aspect that relocated data that had been around for a
while into a "sediment" that usually didn't get rescanned.  I remember
thinking that it might be worth trying this in smaller GC'd language
interpreters like MicroPython.  I don't remember much about it now, but
I spent a while studying it and thinking about documenting and/or
reimplementing it.

SPITBOL (Speedy Implementation of SNOBOL, where SNOBOL was StriNg
Oriented symBOLic language) was a quite amazing 1970s(?) implementation
of a language that could be seen as an antecedent of something like Perl:

https://github.com/spitbol