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by dkersten 1866 days ago
> Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages that is still in use today

I don’t like that this keeps getting repeated. Common Lisp is different from the original Lisp and other modern Lisps are even more different. It’s like saying Algol is one of the oldest programming languages still in use today, because many Algol-descendants are quite popular still.
1 comments
lispm 1866 days ago
Common Lisp may be expanded, but it still has the core of early Lisp, and its ancestors trace back to it: ZetaLisp, Maclisp, Lisp 1.5, Lisp 1.

It still has the old operators: car, cdr, cons, eval, apply, append, cond, quote, lambda, set, setq, atom, and, eq, equal, list, map, mapcon, maplist, nconc, not, null, or, print, prog, read, remprop, rplaca, rplacd, ...

It has the old data structures like symbols and cons cells.

Thus programs from 1960 often can be made running in Common Lisp, unless they make use of system specific functions.

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kragen 1866 days ago
There were no system specific functions in 01960 because there was only one system, which is to say, one implementation of LISP. EVAL was dynamically scoped. And good luck getting any FEXPR-based code from 01960 to run!
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lispm 1865 days ago
Lucky us, writing FEXPRs was not a documented feature in the Lisp 1 manual from 1960.
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