We can’t trace its fortunes year on year, but according to the TIOBE Index, LISP was the third most commonly used language in 1988. Today it’s at position 29, and while that’s a substantial drop since its heyday, we don’t think it’s bad going for a 64-year-old language.
Part four!
If you’re copying code from external documents such as PDFs or Word files into a LISP interpreter, make sure that single and double quotes haven’t been converted into matching opening and closing quotation characters. If you don’t notice that, you could be in for some considerable head scratching – we speak from experience. Programs copied from Rosetta Code don’t suffer from this problem.
LISP IN SPACE
Devised by John McCarthy, who was one of the first researchers to undertake study into artificial intelligence, LISP was introduced in 1959. That makes it the second-oldest high-level language still in use today. John was also a major contributor to last month’s classic language, ALGOL, which appeared in 1960, even though the two languages couldn’t have been more different.
Credit: www.gnu.org/software/gcl/
OUR EXPERT