NIL (programming language)

Nil

Paradigm	multi-paradigm: functional, procedural
Designed by	Jon L White
Developer	Jon L White, Guy L. Steele, Jr. and Richard P. Gabriel
First appeared	1970s
Typing discipline	dynamic, strong

NIL is a 32-bit implementation of Lisp developed at MIT and intended to be the successor to Maclisp. NIL stands for "New Implementation of LISP", and was in part a response to DECs VAX computer. The project was headed by Jon L White, with a stated goal of maintaining compatibility with MacLisp whilst fixing many of the problems with the language.

The Lisp language was invented in 1958 by John McCarthy while he was at MIT. From its inception, Lisp was closely connected with the artificial intelligence research community, especially on PDP-10 systems. Lisp was used as the implementation of the programming language Micro Planner that was the foundation for the famous AI system SHRDLU. Lisp, in particular Maclisp (so called because it originated at MIT's project MAC) was also used to implement the Macsyma computer algebra system. In the 1970s, as AI research spawned commercial offshoots, the performance of existing Lisp systems became a growing issue.

Partly because of garbage collection (Lisp would use stop-and-copy garbage collection of its single heap for memory allocation) and partly because of its representation of internal structures, Lisp became difficult to run on the memory-limited stock hardware of the day. This led to the creation of LISP machines: dedicated hardware for running Lisp environments and programs. An alternative was to use the more powerful commodity hardware which was becoming available, in particular the DEC VAX.

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