[Haskell-cafe] Re: Data constructors versus types

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 17 Jan 2008, at 12:31 pm, Achim Schneider wrote:
> Lisp is actually not really meant to be compiled, but interpreted.


The "classic" Lisp is Lisp 1.5.
The Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual, published in I think 1961,
contains "Appendix D: The Lisp Compiler".
If I'm reading appendix G correctly, the compiler was under
4000 words of storage.

> The
> nice thing is that it doesn't need more than a handful of  
> primitives, a
> list parser and heap manager/garbage collector and evaluator, which  
> all
> can be implemented in under 1000 lines of C. Things get more involved
> with get/cc, but then how many C programmers ever heard of setjmp...

I have no idea what get/cc might be, unless it is a mistake for call/cc,
but that's Scheme, not Lisp.  "Classic" Lisp stack management wasn't  
really
any harder than Pascal stack management (in part because classic  
Lisps were
still struggling to get closures right).