Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

I had something like the Northstar Horizon advertised on page 20 of this issue, and I ran ZCPR/3 on it, because it had a hard drive. This is after I graduated from my Osborne 1.

Ah I miss the old Byte Magazine (like people miss the NES or PS1 etc). The ads looks completely insane with 2022 glasses on - who'd buy a random 64 KB ram extension for an S-100 bus? What was the market for this? Couldn't have been large.

The article about the Lisp interpreter written in 6809 machine language describes a stackless garbage collector which uses the pointer-reversal trick for traversing the heap.

> "The author's system uses the pointer reversal method, and he will testify to the unlimited number of obscure problems which can appear during the debugging phase of its implementation."

:)

The first article in this issue of BYTE has a very interesting characterization of Lisp that I have not come across before. I mean, famous quotes like "Lisp is a programmable programming language" by John Foderaro and "The greatest single programming language ever designed" by Alan Kay are often mentioned in articles about Lisp. But in this issue of BYTE, the article "An Overview of LISP" by John Allen at page 10 has something very interesting to say. Excerpt from the article:

"The best description of the LISP programming language is that it is a high level machine language. That is, it shares many of the facets of contemporary machine language --the necessity for attention to detail and the freedom to manipulate the machine's data and programs without restriction-- yet LISP is high level in that the language contains the expressive power and convenience of traditional high level languages. The contradiction is resolvable: a LISP machine is just a higher level machine whose data items are organized differently from the binary bit patterns of most machines, and the LISP programming language is the assembly language for this machine."

Consider the Emacs Lisp (Elisp) interpreter for example. Elisp interpreter is the Lisp machine. It understands Elisp symbolic expressions, the language of this machine. With enough code written in this machine's language, we get this fine editing and productivity software known as Emacs!

I loved the old Byte issues with the fun covers (I still want to buy prints of a couple like the AI and Smalltalk covers). This particular one was a bit funny because my mom thought it was more of that D&D crap[1]. Thinking about it, reading the DMG and articles about Lisp, might make me think she had a point.

1) I should point out that my parents never bought into that whole D&D is evil craze. Star Frontiers was "cute" though.