Portable Standard Lisp (PSL) is a

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

, a

dialect A dialect is a Variety (linguistics), variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standard language, standardized varieties as well as Vernacular language, vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardize ...

of the language

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

. PSL was inspired by its predecessor, ''Standard Lisp'' and the Portable Lisp

Compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

. It is tail-recursive, late binding (or dynamically bound), and was developed by researchers at the

University of Utah The University of Utah (the U, U of U, or simply Utah) is a public university, public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. It was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret (Book of Mormon), Deseret by the General A ...

in 1980, which released PSL 3.1; development was handed over to developers at

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

in 1982 who released PSL 3.3 and up. Portable Standard Lisp was available as a kit containing a screen editor, a

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

, and an interpreter for several hardware and operating system computing platforms, including Motorola 68000 series, DECSYSTEM-20s, Cray-1s, VAX, and many others. Today, PSL is mainly developed by and available from Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB). Its main modern use is as the underlying language for implementations of Reduce. Like most older Lisps, in the first step, PSL compiles Lisp code to LAP code, which is another

cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

language. However, where older lisps mostly compiled LAP directly to

assembly language In computing, assembly language (alternatively assembler language or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence bet ...

or some architecture dependent intermediate, PSL compiles the LAP to C code, which would run in a virtual machine language; so programs written in it are as portable as C in principle, which is very portable. The compiler was written in PSL or a more primitive dialect named ''System Lisp'' or ''SYSLISP'' as "... an experiment in writing a production-quality Lisp in Lisp itself as much as possible, with only minor amounts of code written by hand in assembly language or other systems languages." so the whole ensemble could bootstrap itself, and improvements to the compiler improved the compiler. Some later releases had a compatibility package for

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S2018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperli ...

, but this is not sustained in the modern versions.

Criticism

Portable Standard Lisp has fewer features than other Lisps, such as

, and some people found it unpleasant to use. Richard P. Gabriel wrote in his popular essay ''Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big'', "the third most standard Lisp was Portable Standard Lisp, which ran on many machines, but very few people wanted to use it;".

Timeline

References

External links

* , Portable Utah Standard Lisp {{Lisp programming language Concurrent programming languages Dynamically typed programming languages Functional languages Lisp programming language family Multi-paradigm programming languages