Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

Re:Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum by qwertyuiop924 on Saturday October 15, 2016 @05:45AM (#12713408)

Thanks for the tremendous amount of info. Now I get the lack of self-hosting.

Yeah, I'm a pretty big fan of Scheme, so I would have probably liked Ralph. We do actually have CLOS-type classes over in schemeland (although not everything is an object by default, of course) now, and by "subset of scheme," most people mean "no call/cc," which I likely wouldn't miss too much.

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Re:Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum by mikelevins on Saturday October 15, 2016 @10:58AM (#12714134)

Ralph lacked call/cc, as you suggest. It did support upward continuations, or "exits", using a special form called bind-exit.

Scheme implementations of CLOS are much more common now than they were in 1992. The only ones I remember from around then are RScheme, Oaklisp, and of course Gregor Kiczales' tinyclos.

As far as language features, I still like Ralph the best of any language I've used, though there are things from newer languages I would want it to incorporate if it still existed today. But the actual usable language I like best today is Common Lisp.

There are a handful of other languages I like a lot--Scheme, Haskell, and ML are at the top of the list--but when I use them seriously, I miss Common Lisp. I don't miss any of them when I use Common Lisp.

I didn't miss Common Lisp or any other language when I was using Ralph.

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