A critique of common LISP

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A critique of common LISP

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Conference on LISP and Functional Programming archive
Proceedings of the 1984 ACM Symposium on LISP and functional programming table of contents

Austin, Texas, United States

Pages: 1 - 8

Year of Publication: 1984

ISBN:0-89791-142-3

Authors

Rodney A. Brooks
Richard P. Gabriel

Sponsors

SIGACT: ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory
SIGART: ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence
SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 2, Downloads (12 Months): 24, Citation Count: 6

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ABSTRACT

A major goal of the COMMON LISP committee was to define a Lisp language with sufficient power and generality that people would be happy to stay within its confines and thus write inherently transportable code. We argue that the resulting language definition is too large for many short-term and medium-term potential applications. In addition many parts of COMMON LISP cannot be implemented very efficiently on stock hardware. We further argue that the very generality of the design with its different efficiency profiles on different architectures works against the goal of transportability.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	Rodney A. Brooks , Richard P. Gabriel , Guy L. Steele, Jr., S-1 Common Lisp implementation, Proceedings of the 1982 ACM symposium on LISP and functional programming, p.108-113, August 15-18, 1982, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/800068.802141]
	2	Many People. Mail messages concerning the development of Common Lisp in COMMON.*{COM,LSP}@SAIL.
	3	Knuth, Donald E. Fourteen Hallmarks of a Good Programming Language. Unpublished.
	4	Steele, Guy Lewis Jr. et. al. Common Lisp Reference Manual. Digital Press, 1984.
	5	Daniel Weinreb, Lisp machine manual, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1981
	6	Brian A. Wichmann, Is Ada too big? A designer answers the critics, Communications of the ACM, v.27 n.2, p.98-103, Feb. 1984 [doi>10.1145/69610.69613]

CITED BY 6

	Kevin A. Broughan, SENAC: a high-level interface for the NAG library, ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS), v.17 n.4, p.462-480, Dec. 1991
	Robert A. MacLachlan, The Python compiler for CMU Common Lisp, ACM SIGPLAN Lisp Pointers, v.V n.1, p.235-246, Jan. 1992
	Guy L. Steele, Jr. , Richard P. Gabriel, The evolution of Lisp, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.28 n.3, p.231-270, March 1993
	Julian Padget , Jérôme Chailloux , Thomas Christaller , Ramon DeMantaras , Jeff Dalton , Matthieu Devin , John Fitch , Timm Krumnack , Eugen Neidl , Eric Papon , Stephen Pope , Christian Queinnec , Luc Steels , Herbert Stoyan, Desiderata for the standardization of LISP, Proceedings of the 1986 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming, p.54-66, August 1986, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
	Guy L. Steele , Richard P. Gabriel, The evolution of Lisp, History of programming languages---II, ACM Press, New York, NY, 1996
	Randall D. Beer, Preliminary report on a practical type inference system for common Lisp, ACM SIGPLAN Lisp Pointers, v.1 n.2, p.5-11, June-July 1987