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by gumby 2795 days ago
Yeah, LOOP is super un-lispy. Dick waters is a great guy but I never liked LOOP and never use it.
1 comments

What does it have to do with him?

The basic idea comes actually from Interlisp and Warren Teitelman‘s ‚Conversational Lisp‘ and its FOR macro.

The main purpose of LOOP is to question ones assumption what is Lispy and what not. ;-)

Pretty sure Dick wrote LOOP. There was an ai working paper on the subject by him iirc too. Teitelman had left mit by the time I got there, though I later got to deal with DWIM (which seems to have infected web browsers and npm etc :-( ) at PARC. one great titlemanism was the addition of ] to Interlisp.
Are you sure you are not mixing this up with the Series system, where Richard Waters wrote a bunch of papers on?

The paper from 1980 on 'LOOP Iteration Macro' by Burke&Moon does not mention him at all.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a087372.pdf

Ha, that's a funny scan! I have a paper copy of that memo someplace.

Yeah, I might be misremembering.