Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL) is an implementation and IDE for the

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S20018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived fro ...

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

. Various versions of MCL run under the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...

(m68k and PPC) and

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

. Versions of MCL up to and including 5.1 are proprietary. Version 5.2 has been open sourced. In 2009 a new different version of MCL has been open sourced: RMCL. RMCL is based on MCL 5.1 and does run under

Rosetta Rosetta or Rashid (; ar, رشيد ' ; french: Rosette ; cop, ϯⲣⲁϣⲓⲧ ''ti-Rashit'', Ancient Greek: Βολβιτίνη ''Bolbitinē'') is a port city of the Nile Delta, east of Alexandria, in Egypt's Beheira governorate. The Ro ...

on Intel-based Macs.

Features of MCL

MCL was famous for its integration with the Macintosh toolbox (later: Apple Carbon), which allowed direct access to most of the Mac OS functionality directly from Lisp. This was achieved with a low-level interface that allowed direct manipulation of native Mac OS data structures from Lisp, together with a high-level interface that was more convenient to use. In a 2001 article in '' Dr. Dobb's Journal'',

Peter Norvig Peter Norvig (born December 14, 1956) is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is t ...

wrote that "MCL is my favorite IDE on the Macintosh platform for any language and is a serious rival to those on other platforms".Extreme Rapid Development
/ref>

History of MCL

Development on MCL began in 1984. Over its history, MCL has been known under different names: Running on 68k-based Apple Macintosh Computers: * 1987, Coral Common Lisp * 1987, Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp * 1988, Apple Macintosh Common Lisp Running on PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh Computers: * 1994, Digitool Macintosh Common Lisp It has also spawned at least one separately maintained fork: * 1998,

Clozure CL Clozure CL (CCL) is a Common Lisp implementation. It implements the full ANSI Common Lisp standard with several extensions (CLOS MOP, threads, CLOS conditions, CLOS streams, ...). It contains a command line development environment, an experimenta ...

(CCL), known previously as OpenMCL * In 2007 MCL 5.2 was open sourced. * In 2009 RMCL (MCL running under

) was published as open source. * Since 2009 an open source version of RMCL (based on MCL 5.2) is hosted at Google Code MCL. This version runs under Rosetta (Apple's PPC to Intel code translator that is an optional install under Mac OS X 10.6).

References

External links

Homepage for the commercial version (now legacy)
* tp://ftp.clozure.com/pub/MCL/ MCL 5.2(sources and binary). * tp://clozure.com/pub/rmcl.zip RMCL(sources and binary).
MCL 5.2 at Google Code
at NIST Common Lisp implementations Common Lisp (programming language) software Lisp (programming language) Functional languages Free compilers and interpreters {{Compu-lang-stub