*Lisp
| Paradigm | parallel |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Cliff Lasser and Steve Omohundro |
| Developer | Thinking Machines Corporation |
| First appeared | 1985 |
| OS | Connection Machine |
| Influenced by | |
| Lisp | |
The *Lisp (aka StarLisp) programming language was conceived of in 1985 by Cliff Lasser and Steve Omohundro (employees of the Thinking Machines Corporation) as a way of providing an efficient yet high-level language for programming the nascent Connection Machine.
At the time the Connection Machine was being designed and built, the only language being actively developed for it was an Assembly-level language known as PARIS (Parallel Instruction Set). It became evident that a better way to program the machine was needed and needed quickly. Waiting for the completion of CM Lisp, or "Connection Machine Lisp" (an implementation of the very high-level programming language Lisp with parallel programming extensions) was not an option. CM Lisp had been proposed by Danny Hillis, and development was expected to continue for several more years.
A *Lisp interpreter was initially developed. It quickly became apparent that a *Lisp compiler, translating *Lisp into Lisp and PARIS, would be needed to attain the gigaflop speeds that were theoretically attainable by a Connection Machine. The *Lisp compiler was written by Jeff Mincy and was first released in 1986. (An application achieving more than two gigaflops, a helicopter wake simulator, was developed by Alan Egolf, then an employee of United Technologies, and J. P. Massar, a Thinking Machines employee, in 1987; see "Helicopter Free Wake Implementation On Advanced Computer Architectures", International Conference on Basic Rotorcraft Research, 1988)
...
Wikipedia