1.2 Lisp History

Lisp (LISt Processing language) was first developed in the late 1950’s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for research in artificial intelligence. The great power of the Lisp language makes it superior for other purposes as well, such as writing editing commands.

Dozens of Lisp implementations have been built over the years, each with its own idiosyncrasies. Many of them were inspired by Maclisp, which was written in the 1960’s at MIT’s Project MAC. Eventually the implementors of the descendants of Maclisp came together and developed a standard for Lisp systems, called Common Lisp.

SXEmacs Lisp is largely inspired by Maclisp, and a little by Common Lisp. If you know Common Lisp, you will notice many similarities. However, many of the features of Common Lisp have been omitted or simplified in order to reduce the memory requirements of SXEmacs. Sometimes the simplifications are so drastic that a Common Lisp user might be very confused. We will occasionally point out how SXEmacs Lisp differs from Common Lisp. If you don’t know Common Lisp, don’t worry about it; this manual is self-contained.