Jeff Dalton  <jeff@todday.aiai.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
+---------------
| There was a time when many individuals and groups implemented their
| Lisp, used "in house".  Some of these were sybstantial systems with
| a compiler and documentation.  Almost all have now been forgotten,
| except by those involved.
| 
| The typical approach back then was to invent your own dialect, taking
| ideas from whatever other Lisps you knew about and found interesting.
| 
| So there was plenty of room for something like Standard Lisp to be
| useful - if anyone wanted to have portable code.  However, the
| attraction of having and using your own Lisp - a Lisp not confined to
| the rather limited features of Standard Lisp - was usually greater.
+---------------

Oh, you mean like Scheme is today?  ;-}  ;-}

[...as he rapidly ducks the expected flames. But the description was
just *too* spot-on to ignore.]

+---------------
| What we might say now is that it should have been a more ambitious
| standard (thus more attractive as a language) and have had a
| "reference implementation".
+---------------

Ditto.


-Rob

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Rob Warnock, PP-ASEL-IA		<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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