LISP: A LITTLE HISTORY
Developed by McCarthy in the late 1960s
First functional language
Motivated by artificial intelligence work and its special need for symbolic processing
Linked lists and associated operations
Programs & data are syntactically the same
Pure Lisp isn’t “practical”; impure Lisps are used extensively in academia and industry
There are many Lisp dialects, including Lisp 1.5, MAC Lisp, Zeta-Lisp, Franz Lisp, UCI Lisp, Interlisp, Scheme, etc.
We use Common Lisp, a standard Lisp with several implementations.
Common Lisp has some significant differences from other Lisps.