Spice Lisp (Scientific Personal Integrated Computing Environment) 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 of

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, ...

. Its implementation, originally written by

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

's (CMU) Spice Lisp Group, targeted the

microcode In processor design, microcode serves as an intermediary layer situated between the central processing unit (CPU) hardware and the programmer-visible instruction set architecture of a computer. It consists of a set of hardware-level instructions ...

of the

16-bit 16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two ...

workstation

PERQ The PERQ, also referred to as the Three Rivers PERQ or ICL PERQ, is a pioneering workstation computer produced in the late 1970s through the early 1980s. It is the first commercially-produced personal workstation with a graphical user interface ...

, and its

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

Accent. It used that

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

's microcode abilities (and provided microcodes for the languages Pascal, C, and Ada) to implement a

stack machine In computer science, computer engineering and programming language implementations, a stack machine is a computer processor or a Virtual machine#Process virtual machines, process virtual machine in which the primary interaction is moving short- ...

architecture to store its data structures as

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in a maximum of 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform la ...

objects and to enable run time type-checking. It would later be popular on other workstations. Spice Lisp evolved into an implementation of

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 ...

, and was renamed

CMU Common Lisp CMUCL is a free Common Lisp implementation, originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University. CMUCL runs on most Unix-like platforms, including Linux and BSD; there is an experimental Windows port as well. Steel Bank Common Lisp is derived fr ...

(CMUCL).

References

External links

* * FOLDOC {{Lisp programming language Common Lisp implementations Lisp programming language family