Re: Newbie Questions

[alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)]

In article <3mud3n$bst@kernighan.cs.umass.edu> eliot@cs.umass.edu
(CHRISTOPHER ELIOT) writes:

>I knew someone whose licence plate was HLRZ.  Goes back to the pdp-10 days
>when there was a 36 bit word, divided into two 18 bit halves and an 18 bit
>address space.  Moving half, left to right, zero-extended with indirect
>addressing was very useful to Lisp implementors.

And there was an auto in the Stanford area with license place CDR.

The PDP-10, of course, was the primary development engine for MACLISP (named
for Project MAC, an MIT research group), which begat a number of incompatible
off-shoots, which led to an effort to create a common subset of all these,
which of course became Common Lisp.  So here we are:  MACLISP led to Mac Lisp.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_