LISP (LISt Processing)

LISP was initially conceived as a pure functional language incorporating dynamic scoping (McCarthy 1960). However, it has evolved to include various imperative features such as assignment. LISP is widely used in Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially in the USA; indeed it was perhaps the most widely used language for AI applications. There are a great number of versions and dialects of LISP available; well known examples include Common LISP (Steele 1984), Franz LISP (Foderaro et al. 1983) and MacLisp (Moon 1974). There are also a number of LISP programming environments in existence, for example INTERLISP (Teitelman 1974), and dedicated single user LISP workstations. Currently Common LISP is acknowledged to be the industry standard.

Although it is possible to use LISP as a pure functional language, the existence of its many non-functional extensions have lead critics to claim that it is not a pure functional language. As a result many "purer" functional languages have been developed such as Miranda and Haskel.

REFERENCES

1. Foderaro, J.K. Skowler, K.L. and Layer, K. (1983). The Franz LISP Manual. University of California, Berkeley, CA.
2. McCarthy, J. (1960). Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine. Communications ACM, Vol(3), pp184-195.
3. Moon, D. (1974). MacLISP Reference Manual. Maschusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
4. Steele, G.L. (1984). Common LISP Reference Manual. Digital Press, Bradford, MA.
5. Teitelmann, W. (1974). InterLISP Reference Manual. Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA.

Created and maintained by Frans Coenen. Last updated 03 July 2001