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Re:Design of Lisp-based Processors (1979) by pjmlp on Sunday February 17, 2013 @01:23PM (#5236102)
The only thing those machines had was direct execution of what you can consider Lisp bytecode and direct support for data types tagging, which could optimize code execution.

But general purpose processors proved to be fast enough for executing code generated by Lisp compilers, hence one of the reasons such machines did not succeed.

Same was tried with Pascal and Java, but it is not worth it.

You don't need a Lisp machine to do system programming in Lisp. All you need is compilation to native code and a set of primitives for low level hardware access.

Re:Design of Lisp-based Processors (1979) by dfox on Sunday February 17, 2013 @02:47PM (#5236426)
It's worth to note that this paper describes different approach than what was done by commercial lisp machines: Implementing Lisp interpreter directly by hardware state machine. It was done on single smallish NMOS ASIC that was actually manufactured and tested. By the way, essentially half of examples and exercises in SICP is directly related to this endeavor.