Re: Lisp is alive, was "Re: Common LISP: The Next Generation"

Subject: Re: Lisp is alive, was "Re: Common LISP: The Next Generation"
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1996/09/08
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.dylan,comp.lang.scheme
Message-ID: <3051169529237741@arcana.naggum.no>


[Rainer Joswig]

|   RPL is the programming language for HP28 and HP48.  Guess what RPL
|   stands for.  Reverse Polish Lisp?

[Robert Sanders]

|   You're reaching.  RPL is very similar to Forth, and has almost nothing
|   in common with Lisp.  I wish it did.

hmmm.  the only similarity to Forth I remember is the stack representation
of arguments and return values.  one might as well say PostScript.

I have also heard that RPL stands for Reverse Polish Lisp internally to HP,
and it's not a joke.  I wrote a fair amount of code in System RPL a few
years back (the internal language, related to RPL like Emacs Lisp to Emacs'
commands).  RPL has dynamic types, type dispatch, garbage collection, many
functions with Lispy names, lambda forms (local variables), etc.  it also
has a number of features that are not lispy at all, and which _could_ be
used to contradict any assessment of RPL as "Lispy".

#\Erik
-- 
those who do not know Lisp are doomed to reimplement it