computer programming Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation (or more generally, accomplishing a specific computing result), usually by designing and building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as anal ...

, Franz Lisp is a discontinued

Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispi ...

programming language system written at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

(UC Berkeley, UCB) by Professor Richard Fateman and several students, based largely on Maclisp and distributed with the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) for the

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unti ...

(DEC) VAX minicomputer. Piggybacking on the popularity of the BSD package, Franz Lisp was probably the most widely distributed and used Lisp system of the 1970s and 1980s. The name is a pun on the composer and pianist

Franz Liszt Franz Liszt, in modern usage ''Liszt Ferenc'' . Liszt's Hungarian passport spelled his given name as "Ferencz". An orthographic reform of the Hungarian language in 1922 (which was 36 years after Liszt's death) changed the letter "cz" to simpl ...

. It was written specifically to be a host for running the Macsyma

computer algebra In mathematics and computer science, computer algebra, also called symbolic computation or algebraic computation, is a scientific area that refers to the study and development of algorithms and software for manipulating mathematical expression ...

system on VAX. The project began at the end of 1978, soon after UC Berkeley took delivery of their first VAX 11/780 (named Ernie CoVax, after Ernie Kovacs, the first of many systems with pun names at UCB). Franz Lisp was available free of charge to educational sites, and was also distributed on

Eunice Eunice is a feminine given name, from the Greek Εὐνίκη, ''Euníkē'', from "eu", good, and "níkē", victory. Eunice is also a relatively rare last name, found in Nigeria and the Southeastern United States, chiefly Louisiana and Georgia. Pe ...

, a Berkeley

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

emulator that ran on VAX

VMS #REDIRECT VMS {{redirect category shell, {{R from other capitalisation{{R from ambiguous page ...

History

At the time of Franz Lisp's creation, the Macsyma computer algebra system ran mainly on a DEC PDP-10. This computer's limited address space caused difficulties. Attempted remedies included ports of Maclisp to Multics or Lisp machines, but even if successful, these would only be solutions for the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

(MIT) as these machines were costly and uncommon. Franz Lisp was the first example of a framework where large

programs could be run outside the Lisp machines environment; Macsyma was then considered a very large program. After being ported to Franz Lisp, Macsyma was distributed to about 50 sites under a license restricted by MIT's interest in making Macsyma proprietary. The VAX Macsyma that ran on Franz Lisp was called Vaxima. When Symbolics Inc., bought the commercial rights to Macsyma from MIT to sell along with its Lisp machines, it eventually was compelled to sell Macsyma also on DEC VAX and

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

computers, paying royalties to the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Fran ...

for the use of Franz Lisp. Other Lisp implementations for the VAX were MIT's NIL (never fully functional), University of Utah's Portable Standard Lisp, DEC's VAX Lisp, Xerox's Interlisp-VAX, and Le Lisp. In 1982, the port of Franz Lisp to the

Motorola 68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sect ...

processor was begun. In particular, it was ported to a prototype Sun-1 made by

, which ran a variant of Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)

called

SunOS SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on BSD, while versions 5.0 ...

. In 1986, at

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and ...

, Franz Lisp was ported to the CCI Power 6/32 platform, code named ''Tahoe''. The major contributors to Franz Lisp at UC Berkeley were John K. Foderaro, Keith Sklower, and Kevin Layer. A company was formed to provide support for Franz Lisp called Franz Inc., by founders Richard Fateman, John Foderaro, Fritz Kunze, Kevin Layer, and Keith Sklower, all associated with UC Berkeley. After that, development and research on Franz Lisp continued for a few years, but the acceptance of Common Lisp greatly reduced the need for Franz Lisp. The first product of Franz Inc. was Franz Lisp running on various

-based workstations. A port of Franz Lisp was even done to VAX VMS for

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), commonly referred to as the Berkeley Lab, is a United States national laboratory that is owned by, and conducts scientific research on behalf of, the United States Department of Energy. Located in ...

. However, almost immediately Franz Inc. began work on their implementation of Common Lisp, Allegro Common Lisp.

Features

The Franz Lisp interpreter was written in C and Franz Lisp. It was bootstrapped solely using the C compiler. The Franz Lisp compiler, written entirely in Franz Lisp, was called Liszt, completing the pun on the name of the composer

. Some notable features of Franz Lisp were arrays in Lisp interchangeable with arrays in Fortran and a foreign function interface (FFI) which allowed interoperation with other languages at the binary level. Many of the implementation methods were borrowed from Maclisp: bibop memory organization (BIg Bag Of Pages), small integers represented uniquely by pointers to fixed values in fields, and fast arithmetic.

Important applications

* Franz Lisp was used as the example language in Robert Wilensky's first edition of ''Lispcraft'' * An implementation of OPS5 by DEC on Franz Lisp was used as the basis for a rule-based system for configuring VAX-11 computer system orders and was important to DEC's sales of these computers * Slang: a circuit simulator used to design and test the reduced instruction set computer RISC-I microprocessor * As a derivative: Cadence Design Systems

Skill A skill is the learned ability to act with determined results with good execution often within a given amount of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. For example, in the domain of w ...

programming language

References

External links

Franz Lisp Opus 38.92 for VAX source code

Franz Lisp
a
History of LISP
{{Lisp programming language Lisp programming language family University of California, Berkeley Franz Liszt

History

Features

Important applications

See also

References

External links