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by trealira 23 days ago
> even GC isn't necessary

Um, isn't it? Don't all Lisp variants have it? IIRC McCarthy's LISP just ran out of memory until the GC was written.

1 comments

> Um, isn't it?

No. There's been GC-less Lisp's over the years, here's a good paper on one: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/142137.142162

There was also pre-Scheme, GOAL, nowadays there's Carp and Dale. Zeta Lisp (and now SBCL) had/have arenas and you can manually allocate, etc...

> McCarthy's LISP

McCarthy also envisioned it having M-expressions.