holg 5 days ago

sure it does, but Lisp is special, and for those times it was very special. I did not want to show how it is done nowadays, but how we had done it 33 yrs ago... And now there is the emulator as the web-page, this is what i wanted to share (everything works as wasm in the browser)...

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  • Animats 5 days ago

    > but Lisp is special, and for those times it was very special.

    It was the only language available at the time suitable for embedding. Memory-safe, small interpreter, sane. Alternatives were Forth and TRAC, which would have been much worse. Pascal would have been better, but it was too hard to squeeze in. The program and data had to fit in 640K. The program was built as a tree of overlays and code was swapped in, so less used code wasn't resident. But it was a cram job.

    (I did some AutoCAD ports and drivers.)

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    • oofoe 4 days ago

      You may be already aware with this, but if not, Walker actually did write a small Forth (ATLAST -- https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/) which was used for (I think) DXFTOOL (a file converter).

      It was later used by a small computer graphics studio in Tennessee for a blue/green screen matting utility and a fast roto-paint program.

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      • holg 3 days ago

        Very interesting, even if tools like ATLAST had been available for free back then, AutoLISP would have won. HP-41CV programming had already wired my brain for stack thinking, and LISP felt like the natural next step. Forth was too raw, LISP had just enough structure.

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