On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Chad Perrin <perrin / apotheon.com> wrote:
> McCarthy was really ahead of his time. Even Common Lisp and Scheme
> haven't caught up with his vision.

1. Nobody has *ever* caught up with Chuck Moore -- not even he
himself. :) He's still tweaking Forth, even though his disciples
standardized it long ago and are in a second round of standards
negotiation. For Chuck's view, see http://www.intellasys.net/.
Warning: here there be dragons, but not of the Dragon Book. :)

2. Lisp 1 and 1.5 were (elegant) hacks for the IBM 704 and its close
descendants. As such, they're very much as elegant as the early Scheme
interpreters. In one of his papers, McCarthy covers the transition
from his 1960 paper to the physical implementation in another paper.
I'm pretty sure it's on the web, but I don't recall where. It *should*
have been reprinted in "Beautiful Code". :)
-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://www.linkedin.com/in/edborasky

I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.