Object Lisp was a computer

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 ...

, a dialect of the Lisp language. It was an

object-oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of " objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of p ...

extension for the Lisp dialect

Lisp Machine Lisp Lisp Machine Lisp is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp. A direct descendant of Maclisp, it was initially developed in the mid to late 1970s as the system programming language for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( ...

, designed by Lisp Machines, Inc. Object Lisp was also an early example of

prototype-based programming Prototype-based programming is a style of object-oriented programming in which behaviour reuse (known as inheritance) is performed via a process of reusing existing objects that serve as prototypes. This model can also be known as ''prototypa ...

. It was seen as a competitor to other object-oriented extensions to Lisp at around the same time such as Flavors, in use by Symbolics,

Common Objects Common may refer to: Places * Common, a townland in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland * Boston Common, a central public park in Boston, Massachusetts * Cambridge Common, common land area in Cambridge, Massachusetts * Clapham Common, originally com ...

developed by Hewlett-Packard, and

CommonLoops CommonLoops (the Common Lisp Object-Oriented Programming System; an acronym reminiscent of the earlier Lisp OO system "Loops" for the Interlisp-D system) is an early programming language which extended Common Lisp to include Object-oriented progr ...

, in use by

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...

. Object Lisp was also used in early versions of

Macintosh Common Lisp Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL) is an implementation and IDE for the Common Lisp programming language. Various versions of MCL run under the classic Mac OS (m68k and PPC) and Mac OS X. Versions of MCL up to and including 5.1 are proprietary. Vers ...

. There, the user interface toolkit was written using Object Lisp.

References

14 December 1985 net.lang.lisp USENET post about the Common Lisp meeting in Boston, 9-11 December 1985, which discusses Object Lisp"ObjectLISP User Manual", G. Drescher, LMI 1985
Object-oriented programming languages Lisp programming language family {{prog-lang-stub