Please correct me if I am wrong but I understand that John McCarthy was involved with first versions of LISP, but variations of the language were created starting with 1.5.
My question is what was the first non-McCarthy version of LISP?
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Please correct me if I am wrong but I understand that John McCarthy was involved with first versions of LISP, but variations of the language were created starting with 1.5.
My question is what was the first non-McCarthy version of LISP?
Well, technically, McCarthy didn’t actually create LISP, the way we know it. McCarthy created a formalism for reasoning about programs, that looked a fair amount like LISP, but not exactly. Steve “Slug” Russell realized that it would not be difficult to implement that formalism in a computer program on the IBM 704, and did so.
It was a bug in that original program that gave us the traditional formatting of LISP lists. The code was supposed to display
and a bug caused it to display
instead. Everyone who saw it liked the comma-less form better, and the bug became a feature.
The names CAR and CDR came directly from the IBM 704 architecture.