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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Lisp history: IF, etc.
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2024 11:23:42 -0700
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
> [Lisp 2] That project was considered a “failure”, but I wonder why?
> Did it turn out that getting rid of the (ahem) quirky Lisp syntax in
> fact got rid of some of its expressive power, too?

This retrospective (8 page PDF) gives the impression that Lisp 2 bogged
down due to the implementation outstripping the limited computers
available at the time.  Plus, Lisp 1.5 had gotten entrenched enough that
Lisp 2's Algol-like syntax didn't excite people any more:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8267589

Lisp 2 had an interesting GC scheme that migrated into SPITBOL which is
where I learned about it.  It was a mark-sweep GC but had a
"generational" aspect that relocated data that had been around for a
while into a "sediment" that usually didn't get rescanned.  I remember
thinking that it might be worth trying this in smaller GC'd language
interpreters like MicroPython.  I don't remember much about it now, but
I spent a while studying it and thinking about documenting and/or
reimplementing it.

SPITBOL (Speedy Implementation of SNOBOL, where SNOBOL was StriNg
Oriented symBOLic language) was a quite amazing 1970s(?) implementation
of a language that could be seen as an antecedent of something like Perl:

https://github.com/spitbol