Lisp编辑历史

# Lisp (Programming Language)

**Lisp** (historically LISP, an acronym for "LISt Processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958 by John McCarthy, Lisp is the second‑oldest high‑level programming language after Fortran. It pioneered many concepts in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher‑order functions, recursion, and the self‑hosting compiler. Lisp dialects have evolved into numerous variants, most notably Common Lisp, Scheme, and Clojure, and remain influential in artificial intelligence, symbolic computation, and metaprogramming.

## 1 History

### 1.1 Origins (1958–1960)

#### 1.1.1 McCarthy's original design

In 1958 John McCarthy, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), conceived Lisp while working on algebraic list processing. The language was designed to operate on symbolic expressions (S‑expressions) rather than numbers, drawing on the lambda calculus of Alonzo Church and the concept of recursive functions. McCarthy published the seminal paper "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine" in 1960, which laid the theoretical foundation.

#### 1.1.2 First implementation on IBM 704

The first Lisp interpreter was implemented on an IBM 704 computer at MIT in 1958–1960. It was developed by McCarthy and his students (including Steve Russell, who realized that the universal function could be implemented as an interpreter). The IBM 704’s 36‑bit word and special features (such as the CAR and CDR instructions) directly influenced the representation of cons cells and list manipulation.

### 1.2 Early evolution (1960s–1970s)

#### 1.2.1 MacLisp and Interlisp

During the 1960s and 1970s, two major dialects emerged: **MacLisp** (developed at MIT’s Project MAC) and **Interlisp** (originating at Bolt, Beranek and Newman