Weird Lisp History: In ~1980 a friend of mine and I, in our senior year
at Penn, wrote a Lisp book call "Learning Lisp". This was in the time
of the Apple II, WAY before CL, and I think before most of the popular
lisp textbooks of the time, like Toureztky's [I'm not too sure of all
the publication dates of all those, but I think that if they had
existed, we wouldn't have felt the need to write one of our own!]
We never published it... But wait, this gets more interesting!
At about the same time, a mutual friend of ours independently wrote a
toy Apple II Lisp interpreter called PLisp. After we all graduated he
formed a little company called Gnosis and tried to sell PLisp, and I
think did some small amount of business. (I know of present-day Lisp
programmers people for whom PLisp was their first experience with
Lisp!) Since we had a Lisp book sitting around, and he had a Lisp
interpreter, we gave him the book sources and he modified them to
become the PLisp manual. I also wrote him some additional code for
PLisp, esp. the PLisp code editor -- an early IDE!
[Several years pass]
In 1984, through absolutely no doing of me or my co-author's, "Learning
Lisp" appeared *IN PRINT* from a technical imprint of Prentice Hall
under the authorship of "Gnosis"! [I'm not the least bit disturbed by
the fact that Gnosis got this into print without us on the cover; my
friend and I are acknowledged in the preface as the original authors.
Quite to the contrary, I'm grateful that it happened at all!]
Sometime later it was even translated into French ("Apprendre Lisp!");
my cousin happened upon it in a bookstore in Paris! [I have copies of
both the French and English versions, and you can still occasionally
find them on Ebay.]
[Many years pass]
Completely by accident I ran into this about a month ago:
http://venus.deis.unical.it/manuals/llisp/index.html
I have no idea who did this, nor why, but it seem to have not only been
scanned, but actually cleaned up (some)!
I definitely do NOT recommend trying to learn Lisp from it -- it has
many typos, and is pre-CL (it's actually got FEXPRs!)
Just a weird artifact and story from Lisp history that I thought you
might get a laugh out of...
Cheers,
'Jeff
(How many of you started out on PLisp?)
In article <························@y43g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
········@gmail.com wrote:
> Weird Lisp History: In ~1980 a friend of mine and I, in our senior year
> at Penn, wrote a Lisp book call "Learning Lisp". This was in the time
> of the Apple II, WAY before CL, and I think before most of the popular
> lisp textbooks of the time, like Toureztky's [I'm not too sure of all
> the publication dates of all those, but I think that if they had
> existed, we wouldn't have felt the need to write one of our own!]
>
> We never published it... But wait, this gets more interesting!
>
> At about the same time, a mutual friend of ours independently wrote a
> toy Apple II Lisp interpreter called PLisp. After we all graduated he
> formed a little company called Gnosis and tried to sell PLisp, and I
> think did some small amount of business. (I know of present-day Lisp
> programmers people for whom PLisp was their first experience with
> Lisp!) Since we had a Lisp book sitting around, and he had a Lisp
> interpreter, we gave him the book sources and he modified them to
> become the PLisp manual. I also wrote him some additional code for
> PLisp, esp. the PLisp code editor -- an early IDE!
>
> [Several years pass]
>
> In 1984, through absolutely no doing of me or my co-author's, "Learning
> Lisp" appeared *IN PRINT* from a technical imprint of Prentice Hall
> under the authorship of "Gnosis"! [I'm not the least bit disturbed by
> the fact that Gnosis got this into print without us on the cover; my
> friend and I are acknowledged in the preface as the original authors.
> Quite to the contrary, I'm grateful that it happened at all!]
>
> Sometime later it was even translated into French ("Apprendre Lisp!");
> my cousin happened upon it in a bookstore in Paris! [I have copies of
> both the French and English versions, and you can still occasionally
> find them on Ebay.]
>
> [Many years pass]
>
> Completely by accident I ran into this about a month ago:
>
> http://venus.deis.unical.it/manuals/llisp/index.html
>
> I have no idea who did this, nor why, but it seem to have not only been
> scanned, but actually cleaned up (some)!
>
> I definitely do NOT recommend trying to learn Lisp from it -- it has
> many typos, and is pre-CL (it's actually got FEXPRs!)
>
> Just a weird artifact and story from Lisp history that I thought you
> might get a laugh out of...
>
> Cheers,
> 'Jeff
>
> (How many of you started out on PLisp?)
My memory is fading, but I remember a Lisp on the Apple II that I've
'used' (played with is probably more correct) in the early eighties.
Probably one of the first Lisps I have seen. It was very very
simple and list oriented. You could do some exercises
in 48kbytes memory. Hmm, was there some simple structure editor?
Then the Byte magazine had the cover article on Smalltalk 84
- what a shock! I really thought that now the relevant stuff
in information technology was invented and there was
no interesting future work possible.
--
http://lispm.dyndns.org/