[amszmidt]

> Provocative question: would a modern Lisp Machine necessarily use Lisp?

Seeing that not even "Original Gangster" Lisp Machine used Lisp ...

Both the Lambda and CADR are RISCy machines with very little specific to Lisp (the CADR was designed specifically to just run generic VM instructions, one cool hack on the CADR was to run PDP-10 instructions).

By Emacs you definitely mean GNU Emacs -- there are other implementations of Emacs. To most people, what the Lisp Machine was (is?), was a full operating system with editor, compiler, debugger and very easy access to all levels of the system. Lisp .. wasn't the really interesting thing, Smalltalk, Oberon .. share the same idea.