Re: Z-80 Lisp

[BRoberts at BBNG (Bruce Roberts)]

The book you were looking for is:

John Allen "Anatomy of LISP" McGraw-Hill 1978.

In additional to his other interests and teaching responsibilities at
Stanford, John Allen (JRA@SU-AI) has a company called The LISP Company
-- (T . (L . C)) and is very interested in promoting Lisp on small
machines.  In fact, he has written TLC-Lisp, which runs on a Z-80
under CP/M.  This is not a toy implementation.  He explicitly
acknowledges Maclisp as the ancestor of TLC-Lisp and this is apparent
in the choice of functions provided.  One finds the generalized DO
statement, &keyword arguments to DEFUN, macros, readmacros,
catch/throw, LET, and many familiar function names.  I would say the
most obvious omission to date is any kind vector/array/hunk data
structure; but it does have string and character datatypes.  No
compiler is advertised, but one exists that handles about 60% of the
language and produces a factor of 4 speed up.

TLC-Lisp has two schemes for overcoming the address space limitation
of the Z-80: (1) an "autoload" that brings in lisp objects from a file
(either permanently or each time referenced), (2) at least on Cromemco
systems, using bank-switching to extend the usable address size in
which to store lisp objects to 4*32K.  An object takes 4 bytes to
store, so one can have 32,000 of them.

We have recently acquired a Cromemco Z-2D system and have just begun
to develop some software for it (in C and TLC); our initial
impressions are very favorable.

Support John Allen's efforts if possible; his company is lurching
along at this point, and deserves to flourish.
The address is: The Lisp Company
                P.O. Box 487
                Redwood Estates, CA  95044
                (408) 353-3857