Lisp

1) John McCarthy's Home Page
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/


2) Lisp之根源
http://daiyuwen.freeshell.org/gb/rol/roots_of_lisp.html#foot84

约翰麦卡锡于1960年发表了一篇非凡的论文,他在这篇论文中对编程的贡献有如 欧几里德对几何的贡献.1 他向我们展示了,在只给定几个简单的操作符和一个 表示函数的记号的基础上, 如何构造出一个完整的编程语言. 麦卡锡称这种语 言为Lisp, 意为List Processing, 因为他的主要思想之一是用一种简单的数据结构表(list)来代表代码和数据.

值得注意的是,麦卡锡所作的发现,不仅是计算机史上划时代的大事, 而且是一种 在我们这个时代编程越来越趋向的模式.我认为目前为止只有两种真正干净利落, 始终如一的编程模式:C语言模式和Lisp语言模式.此二者就象两座高地, 在它们 中间是尤如沼泽的低地.随着计算机变得越来越强大,新开发的语言一直在坚定地 趋向于Lisp模式. 二十年来,开发新编程语言的一个流行的秘决是,取C语言的计 算模式,逐渐地往上加Lisp模式的特性,例如运行时类型和无用单元收集.

在这篇文章中我尽可能用最简单的术语来解释约翰麦卡锡所做的发现. 关键是我 们不仅要学习某个人四十年前得出的有趣理论结果, 而且展示编程语言的发展方 向. Lisp的不同寻常之处--也就是它优质的定义--是它能够自己来编写自己 .为了理解约翰麦卡锡所表述的这个特点,我们将追溯他的步伐,并将他的数学标记 转换成能够运行的Common Lisp代码.

3) CAR & CDR
http://www.iwriteiam.nl/HaCAR_CDR.html

I wrote the first implimenation of a LISP interpreter on the IBM 704 at MIT in early in 1959. I hand-compiled John McCarthy's "Universal LISP Function".
The 704 family (704, 709, 7090) had "Address" and "Decrement" fields that were 15 bits long in some of the looping instructions. There were also special load and store instructions that moved these 15-bit addresses between memory and the index regiseters ( 3 on the 704, 7 on the others )

We had devised a representation for list structure that took advantage of these instructions.

Because of an unfortunate temporary lapse of inspiration, we couldn't think of any other names for the 2 pointers in a list node than "address" and "decrement", so we called the functions CAR for "Contents of Address of Register" and CDR for "Contents of Decrement of Register".

After several months and giving a few classes in LISP, we realized that "first" and "rest" were better names, and we (John McCarthy, I and some of the rest of the AI Project) tried to get people to use them instead.

Alas, it was too late! We couldn't make it stick at all. So we have CAR and CDR.

As the 704 has 36 bit words, there were 6 bits in the list nodes that were not used. Our initial implimentation did not use them at all, but the first garbage collector, comissioned in the summer of 1959, used some of them as flags.

Atoms were indicated by having the special value of all 1's in car of the first word of the property list. All 0's was NIL, the list terminator.

We were attempting to improve on "IPL-V", (for Interpretive Processing of Lists - version 5) which ran on a 650. I believe that the 0 list terminator was used there, but I believe that the all 1's flag for atoms was original.

Hope this is enlightening.


After these historical blind alleys, it's interesting to think about why car and cdr still persist fifty years after McCarthy and Russell roamed the halls of MIT evangelising first and rest. Common Lisp does at least have first and rest as part of the standard. However, when I was taught Lisp in the mid-90's, I was encouraged to primarily favor the older car and cdr.I remember two primary reasons for this. The first was that existing code favored car and cdr, so it was important to be able to read code written in that style. The second reason was that first and rest impose a particular meaning on the fields of a cons cell that may or may not be appropriate. In the common case of a linear list, first and rest work rather well. If you call first on the list, you get the first element, if you call rest, you get the rest. In the case of a cons cell as a node of an association list, they work less well, unless, that is, you can figure out a reason why first makes sense as 'key', and rest makes sense as 'value'.


4) Lisp的wiki
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/LISP
http://lisp.org.cn/wiki/

5) Lisp方言
http://www.schemers.org/
http://www.lisp.org/alu/home
http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/