NIL was a 32-bit implementation of Lisp developed at MIT and intended to be the successor to MacLisp. NIL stood for "New Implementation of LISP", and was in part a response to DECs VAX computer. The project was headed by Jon L White , with a stated goal of maintaining compatibility with MacLisp whilst fixing many of the problems with the language.
The Lisp language was invented in 1958 by John McCarthy while he was at MIT. From its inception, Lis...
more
NIL was a 32-bit implementation of Lisp developed at MIT and intended to be the successor to MacLisp. NIL stood for "New Implementation of LISP", and was in part a response to DECs VAX computer. The project was headed by Jon L White , with a stated goal of maintaining compatibility with MacLisp whilst fixing many of the problems with the language.
The Lisp language was invented in 1958 by John McCarthy while he was at MIT. From its inception, Lisp was closely connected with the artificial intelligence research community, especially on PDP-10 systems. Lisp was used as the implementation of the programming language Micro Planner that was the foundation for the famous AI system SHRDLU. Lisp, in particular MacLisp (so called because it originated at MIT's project MAC) was also used to implement the Macsyma computer algebra system. In the 1970s, as AI research spawned commercial offshoots, the performance of existing Lisp systems became a growing issue.
Partly because of garbage...
less
