ISLISP - FAQ

Q: What is ISLISP?

A: ISLISP was designed on the bases of KL (proposed by Japan) and CLOS (proposed by US), reflecting experiences of COMMON LISP, EULISP, LE LISP, and SCHEME, and taking into account common practices in the Lisp community. ISLISP is a small Lisp, but it is designed with extensibility in mind, trying to keep compatibility with existing Lisp dialects, too.

ISLISP would be embeddable in COMMON LISP implementations without big efforts, but ISLISP will promote efficient implementations if it is implemented from scratch. ISO ISLISP, ANSI COMMON LISP and IEEE SCHEME would be co-existing and complementary in the Lisp community, since they have their own distinctive features in languages, systems, and applications.

Q: which ISLISP implementations are available?

A: OpenLisp is a commercial implementation made by Eligis: ``It conforms to ISLISP with extension libraries. OpenLisp has been ported on more than 50 different architectures (compiler/OS/processor) from small 16 bits MS-DOS systems to 64 bits processors. OpenLisp is essentially a very fast interpreter that competes in speed with some CLtL compilers. It is written in ISO C for the kernel and using POSIX like interface for the operating System when available.''

TISL is an experimental interpreter and compiler for ISLISP made at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.