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Franz Lisp, written at UC Berkeley by the students of Professor Richard J. Fateman, was a Lisp system based largely on Maclisp, but written specifically to be a host for running the Macsyma computer algebra system on a Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) VAX. The University of California Berkeley (also referred to as Cal, Berkeley and UC Berkeley) is a major research university located in Berkeley Richard Fateman is a professor emeritus of Computer science at the University of California Berkeley. Lisp (or LISP) is a family of Computer Programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully parenthesized syntax MACLISP (or Maclisp) is a dialect of the Lisp Programming language. Macsyma is a Computer algebra system that was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT as part of Project MAC and later A computer algebra system ( CAS) is a software program that facilitates Symbolic mathematics. Name "VAX" was originally an Acronym for V irtual A ddress e' X' tension, both because the VAX was seen as a 32-bit It appeared on the scene at the end of 1978 shortly after UC Berkeley took delivery of their first VAX 11/780 (named Ernie CoVax, the first of many systems with pun names at UCB). The University of California Berkeley (also referred to as Cal, Berkeley and UC Berkeley) is a major research university located in Berkeley

Franz Lisp was distributed with the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) for the VAX (free to educational sites). It was also distributed on Eunice, a Berkeley UNIX emulator that ran on VAX/VMS. Piggybacking on the popularity of the BSD package, Franz Lisp was probably the most widely distributed and used Lisp system of the 1970s and 1980s. [1]

Contents

History

At the time of Franz Lisp's creation, the Macsyma computer algebra system ran principally on a DEC PDP-10. Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the Computer industry The PDP-10 was a Mainframe computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC from the late 1960s on the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor This computer's limited address space caused difficulties. Attempted remedies included ports of Maclisp to Multics or Lisp Machines, but even if successful these would only be solutions for MIT as these machines were expensive and not commonly available. Multics ( Mult iplexed I nformation and C omputing S ervice was an extremely influential early Time-sharing Operating system Lisp machines were general-purpose Computers designed (usually through hardware support to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. Franz Lisp was the first example of a framework where large Lisp programs could be run outside the Lisp Machine environment—at the time, Macsyma was considered a very large program. Lisp (or LISP) is a family of Computer Programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully parenthesized syntax Lisp machines were general-purpose Computers designed (usually through hardware support to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. After being ported to Franz Lisp, Macsyma was distributed to about 50 sites under a license restricted by MIT's interest in making Macsyma proprietary. The VAX Macsyma that ran on Franz Lisp was called Vaxima. When Symbolics Inc. bought the commercial rights to Macsyma from MIT to sell along with its Lisp Machines, it eventually was compelled to sell Macsyma also on DEC VAX and Sun Microsystems computers, paying royalties to the University of California for the use of Franz Lisp. Symbolics is a privately held company that acquired the assets of the now-defunct Computer manufacturer Symbolics Inc Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services

Other Lisp implementations for the VAX were MIT's NIL (never completely functional), University of Utah's Portable Standard Lisp, DEC's VAX Lisp, Xerox's Interlisp-VAX and Le Lisp. NIL was a 32-bit implementation of Lisp developed at MIT and intended to be the successor to MacLisp. Portable Standard Lisp ( PSL) is a tail-recursive dynamically bound dialect of Lisp inspired by its predecessor Standard Lisp and Le Lisp is a Lisp dialect close to Common Lisp; it is lexically scoped with a CLOS -like object system and using both packages and modules

In 1982 the port of Franz Lisp to the Motorola 68000 processor was started. The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit CISC Microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola Semiconductor In particular, it was ported to a prototype Sun-1 made by Sun Microsystems, which ran a variant of Berkeley UNIX called SunOS. Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services SunOS is a version of the Unix Operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their Workstation and server Computer In 1986, at Purdue University, Franz Lisp was ported to the CCI Power 6/32 platform (code named "Tahoe"). Computer Consoles Inc or CCI was a Telephony and Computer company located in Rochester New York, USA, which did business first

The major contributors to Franz Lisp at UC Berkeley were John K. The University of California Berkeley (also referred to as Cal, Berkeley and UC Berkeley) is a major research university located in Berkeley Foderaro, Keith Sklower and Kevin Layer.

A company was formed to provide support for Franz Lisp called Franz Inc. The founders of Franz Inc. Franz Inc was founded in early 1984 as a vehicle to produce and sell Macsyma. were Richard Fateman, John Foderaro, Fritz Kunze, Kevin Layer and Keith Sklower, all associated with UC Berkeley. Richard Fateman is a professor emeritus of Computer science at the University of California Berkeley. The University of California Berkeley (also referred to as Cal, Berkeley and UC Berkeley) is a major research university located in Berkeley After the founding of Franz Inc. , development and research on Franz Lisp terminated. The first product of Franz Inc. was Franz Lisp running on various Motorola 68000-based workstations. However, almost immediately Franz Inc. began work on the new dialect of Lisp called Common Lisp. Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp Programming language, published in ANSI standard document Information

Features

The Franz Lisp interpreter was written in C and Franz Lisp. tags please moot on the talk page first! --> In Computing, C is a general-purpose cross-platform block structured It was bootstrapped solely using the C compiler. The Franz Lisp compiler, written entirely in Franz Lisp, was called Liszt, completing the pun on the name of the composer Franz Liszt.

Some notable features of Franz Lisp were arrays in Lisp interchangeable with arrays in Fortran and a foreign function interface which allowed interoperation with other languages at the binary level. Fortran (previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative Programming language that is especially suited to A foreign function interface (or) is a mechanism by which a program written in one Programming language can call routines or make use of services written in another Many of the implementation techniques were borrowed from Maclisp: bibop memory organization (BIg Bag Of Pages), small integers represented uniquely by pointers to fixed values in fields, and fast arithmetic.

Important applications

See also

References

  1. ^ "It evolved into one of the most commonly available Lisp dialects on Unix machines. " pg 60/294 of Gabriel 1985

External links

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