Re: JWNO: tiling WM for Windows

On Wed, 4 Jun 2025 10:44:20 +0100, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

When I was a boy Lisp was a heavyweight language. Oh how this change.

The core of Lisp is actually quite small: there is a set of “special
forms” that have to be special-cased by the parser. Everything else is a
function or macro call.

For me, an early exposure to Lisp was looking at the Franz Lisp manual.
This was the language that Macsyma was written in. The manual mostly
consisted of describing the built-in functions and macros -- I think there
were hundreds.

Macsyma itself was resource-hungry enough to bring our VAX-11/780 almost
to its knees. Our sysadmin patched the executable to change the page fault
cluster size from 16 to 1, and that helped a lot.