info-mac@uw-beaver (01/30/85)
From: John W. Peterson <JW-Peterson@UTAH-20.ARPA> Speaking of Lisp on the Mac, we have a small version of Utah's PSL (Portable Standard Lisp) now running on the Mac. For those of you who don't know about PSL, it is a portable lisp implementation written almost entirely in itself. Versions of PSL currently run on the Vax, the Dec-20, IBM mainframes, Cray's, and some 68000 based systems. It is essentially MIT Mac Lisp derivitive. The Macintosh PSL has been trimmed down, things like floating point support and the compiler are not implemented. However, it does run on 128K machines! The heap is large enough to support educational- type programs, e.g., 3 pages or so in length. It does have a garbage collector. The system takes advantage of the Macintosh window system and has an editor window and a transcript window (the editor even knows how to do paren matching...) We are currently alpha-testing it, and will be using it with lower division CS classes here at Utah in the next couple weeks. Since all of our instructional Macs are 128K, ability to run on the small machine was important. We are negotiating release to the rest of the world, however it won't be available for outside distribution for a while yet. We definitly intend on making a low-cost version available for consortium use. John W. Peterson (JW-PETERSON@UTAH-20) -------