Talk:Maclisp

Is Maclisp currently maintained?

The following was contributed by User:Cstacy on the article page and was moved to the Talk page

Administrators of Wikipedia claim that Maclisp "is not maintained" anymore, based on having done some kind of Google search and not found anything, and insist on presenting their opinion as a fact in describing the program, even when first-hand sources (such as system programmers from Project MAC) inform them otherwise. While it is common knowledge among PDP-10 users that MACLISP is still used, and maintained sufficiently to make that a reality, the official policy of Wikipedia is the editorial pronouncement that "Maclisp is not maintained anymore".

Here is a sample output (from a system running ITS) illustrating how "Maclisp is not maintained anymore". (Maclisp also runs under TOPS-20.)

IT IS NOW  2:23:56 AM EST, FRIDAY, NOV 18,2005
:lisp

LISP 2149
Alloc? n


* 
(eq 'wikipedia-consensus 'reality)
NIL 
(cons 'a 'b)
(A . B) 
(quit)
:KILL

The above demonstration of Maclisp being used in late 2005 contributed by a first source -- one of the ITS system programmers from the early 80s the MIT AI Lab (aka Project MAC) -- was commented out by one "maru dubshinki", who remarked that since he could not figure out where to download Maclisp from, it was unmaintained, and furthermore that Lisp was "washed up". This resulted in the source declaring that he would never waste his time contributing to Wikipedia in the future.

end of comments by Cstacy

Cstacy, as someone who worked on Maclisp before you at Project MAC, I'm delighted to hear that Maclisp is still maintained. Could you please provide more information on this version? Does it run on a PDP-10 emulator? What has been done to it since the 1980's? (MACRAK@MC) --Macrakis 20:15, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

@Macrakis, there has been some updates in recent years. But really, they are the bare minimum changes to fix bugs and add new machine names. Version history going back to 2016 can be found here: https://github.com/PDP-10/its/commits/master/src/l

Lars Brinkhoff (talk) 06:44, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Bignum history

I think Jon L. White did the implementation using Knuth's book. Bignums were needed for symbolic math. I think there was a bug in the double-add-back case. Bill Gosper may have found it while calculating pi and fixed it, or it may have been found and fixed by Alan Bawden. Glrx (talk) 20:38, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, it was Hilarie Orman (Capps) and Rich Schroeppel who did most of the work on bignums, though Jonl probably was involved, too. There was a bug in the division code which Gosper found with some calculation, though I don't remember if it had to do with pi. It was fixed long before Alan Bawden was a member of the Lisp group. --Macrakis (talk) 13:57, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

@Glrx: -- sorry, I should have pinged you for the above comment. --˜˜˜˜