New Implementation of LISP (NIL) is a
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language.
The description of a programming l ...
, a
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that ...
of the language
Lisp
A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech.
Types
* A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispi ...
, developed at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...
(MIT) during the 1970s, and intended to be the successor to the language
Maclisp.
It is a
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 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calcula ...
implementation,
and was in part a response to
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unti ...
's (DEC)
VAX computer. The project was headed by Jon L White, with a stated goal of maintaining compatibility with MacLisp while fixing many of its problems.
History
The
Lisp
A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech.
Types
* A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispi ...
language was invented in 1958 by
John McCarthy while he was at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...
(MIT). From its inception, Lisp was closely connected with the
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machine
A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, moveme ...
(AI) research
community
A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, villag ...
, especially on
PDP-10 systems. The
36-bit word
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consen ...
size of the
PDP-6 and
PDP-10 was influenced by the usefulness of having two Lisp
18-bit
18 binary digits have (1000000 octal, 40000 hexadecimal) distinct combinations.
18 bits was a common word size for smaller computers in the 1960s, when large computers often used 36 bit words and 6-bit character sets, sometimes implemented a ...
pointers in one word: "The PDP-6 project started in early 1963, as a
24-bit machine. It grew to 36 bits for LISP, a design goal." Lisp was used as the implementation of the programming language Micro
Planner
Planner may refer to:
* A personal organizer (book) for planning
* Microsoft Planner
* Planner programming language
* Planner (PIM for Emacs)
* Urban planner
* Route planner
* Meeting and convention planner
* Japanese term for video game de ...
that was the foundation for the famous AI system
SHRDLU. Lisp, in particular
Maclisp (so named because it originated at MIT's project MAC) was also used to implement the
Macsyma computer algebra system. In the 1970s, as AI research spawned commercial offshoots, the performance of extant Lisp systems became a growing problem.
Partly because of
garbage collection (Lisp would use stop-and-copy garbage collection of its single heap for
memory allocation[) and partly because of its representation of internal structures, Lisp became difficult to run on the memory-limited stock computer hardware of the day. This led to creating Lisp machines: dedicated hardware for running Lisp environments and programs. An alternative was to use the more powerful commodity hardware which was becoming available, especially the ]Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unti ...
(DEC) VAX.
NIL was an implementation of Lisp
A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech.
Types
* A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispi ...
developed at MIT in the mid to late 1970s, and intended to be a modern successor to Maclisp that was able to run on stock hardware,[ in contrast to Lisp Machine Lisp for the Lisp machines.][ "Originally designed as the first modern Lisp dialect on stock hardware after the development of Lisp machine Lisp at MIT, it went on to become one of the main influences on the design of Common Lisp." (pg 63/294 of ][) Since the users of the Macsyma program represented a large potential user base for NIL, it was necessary that NIL would be a large, complex system, and that speed would be imperative. For example, high-speed bignums was a requirement to support Macsyma, since NIL would be a failure with slow bignums. Consequently, NIL ended up with a large base of VAX assembly language. These requirements led to a very aggressive and complex optimization strategy which was applied prematurely, with negative results on the final system.]
Concurrent with the effort to write NIL, a research group at Stanford University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...
headed by Richard P. Gabriel were investigating the design of a Lisp to run on the S-1 Mark IIA supercomputer, S-1 Lisp. That Lisp was never fully functional, but was a test bed for implementing advanced compiler
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...
methods in a Lisp. Eventually the S-1 and NIL groups began collaborating.
Although unsuccessful in meeting its goals as a used language, NIL was important in several ways. First, it brought together Jon L. White, Guy L. Steele Jr., and Richard P. Gabriel, who were later to define Common Lisp
Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S20018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived fr ...
.[ Second, Jonathan Rees worked on part of the NIL project during a year away from ]Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
. On returning to Yale, he was hired by the computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...
department to write a new Lisp, which became the optimizing, native code Scheme system named T. In part, NIL begat this name, since "T is not NIL".[
]
Quotes
References
Bibliography
* Brent T. Hailpern, Bruce L. Hitson. S-1 Architecture Manual. Technical Report 161 (STAN-CS-79-715), Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, January 1979.
* G. Burke. Introduction to NIL. Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 1983.
* G.S. Burke, G.J. Carrette, C.R. Eliot. NIL Notes for Release 0.259, Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 1983.
* G.S. Burke, G.J. Carrette, C. R. Eliot. NIL Reference Manual. Report MIT/LCS/TR-311, Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983.
Papers
* Steven Correll. S-1 uniprocessor architecture (sma-4). Volume I, Chapter 4, The S-1 Project 1979 Annual Report, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Livermore, California, 1979.
* Jon L. White. Nil: A perspective. Proceedings of 1979 Macsyma Users' Conference, Washington, D.C., June 1979.
* Rodney A. Brooks, Richard P. Gabriel, Guy L. Steele Jr. S-1 Common Lisp Implementation. Proceedings of the 1982 ACM symposium on LISP and functional programming, Pittsburgh, 1982, pages 108 – 113. ACM DL
* Rodney A. Brooks, Richard P. Gabriel, Guy L. Steele Jr. An optimizing compiler for a lexically scoped LISP. Proceedings of the 1982 Symposium on Compiler Construction, Boston, June 1982, pages 261–275. ACM DL
* Mark Smotherman. S-1 Supercomputer (1975–1988). Web site, last updated April 24, 2004. http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/s1.html
{{Lisp programming language
Dynamically typed programming languages
Functional languages
Lisp programming language family
Programming languages created in 1979