In multiplayer online games , a MUSH (a backronymed variation on MUD most often expanded as Multi-User Shared Hallucination, though Multi-User Shared Hack, Habitat, and Holodeck are also observed) is a text-based online social medium to which multiple users are connected at the same time. MUSHes are often used for online social interaction and role-playing games , although the first forms of MUSH do not appear to be coded specifically to implement gaming activity. MUSH software was originally derived from MUDs; today's two major MUSH variants are descended from TinyMUD , which was fundamentally a social game. MUSH has forked over the years and there are now different varieties with different features, although most have strong similarities and one who is fluent in coding one variety can switch to coding for the other with only a little effort. The source code for most widely used MUSH servers is open source and available from its current maintainers.
66-474: A primary feature of MUSH codebases that tends to distinguish it from other multi-user environments is the ability, by default, of any player to extend the world by creating new rooms or objects and specifying their behavior in the MUSH's internal scripting language. The programming language for MUSH, usually referred to as "MUSHcode" or "softcode" (to distinguish it from "hardcode" – the language in which
132-561: A Communist , he became a conservative Republican after a visit to Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the Soviet invasion . He died at his home in Stanford on October 24, 2011. In 1979 McCarthy wrote an article entitled "Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines". In it he wrote, "Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem-solving performance." In 1980
198-451: A PhD in mathematics in 1951 with his dissertation " Projection operators and partial differential equations ", under the supervision of Donald C. Spencer . After short-term appointments at Princeton and Stanford University , McCarthy became an assistant professor at Dartmouth in 1955. A year later, he moved to MIT as a research fellow in the autumn of 1956. By the end of his years at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) he
264-664: A Russian popular science book for children. He was fluent in the Russian language and made friends with Russian scientists during multiple trips to the Soviet Union , but distanced himself after making visits to the Soviet Bloc , which led to him becoming a conservative Republican . McCarthy graduated from Belmont High School two years early and was accepted into Caltech in 1944. He showed an early aptitude for mathematics ; during his teens, he taught himself college math by studying
330-404: A computer program used to play a series of chess games with counterparts in the Soviet Union ; McCarthy's team lost two games and drew two games (see Kotok-McCarthy ). From 1978 to 1986, McCarthy developed the circumscription method of non-monotonic reasoning . In 1982, he seems to have originated the idea of the space fountain , a type of tower extending into space and kept vertical by
396-526: A decade earlier than Common Lisp, Scheme is a more minimalist design. It has a much smaller set of standard features but with certain implementation features (such as tail-call optimization and full continuations ) not specified in Common Lisp. A wide variety of programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, and message passing styles, find convenient expression in Scheme. Scheme continues to evolve with
462-402: A flag that, when set on a player, bestows the ability to view and modify nearly everything in the game's database. Such players are usually called Wizards , and typically form the basis for the MUSH administration. Maintainers and developers of MUSH servers have traditionally shared ideas with one another, so most MUSH servers include concepts or code developed originally in other servers. There
528-407: A flexible and powerful form of dynamic dispatch . It has served as the template for many subsequent Lisp (including Scheme ) object systems, which are often implemented via a metaobject protocol , a reflective meta-circular design in which the object system is defined in terms of itself: Lisp was only the second language after Smalltalk (and is still one of the very few languages) to possess such
594-617: A great compliment because it transmits the full flavour of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts. Largely because of its resource requirements with respect to early computing hardware (including early microprocessors), Lisp did not become as popular outside of the AI community as Fortran and the ALGOL -descended C language. Because of its suitability to complex and dynamic applications, Lisp enjoyed some resurgence of popular interest in
660-623: A kind of automatic memory management , to solve problems in Lisp. During his time at MIT , he helped motivate the creation of Project MAC , and while at Stanford University, he helped establish the Stanford AI Laboratory , for many years a friendly rival to Project MAC. McCarthy was instrumental in the creation of three of the very earliest time-sharing systems ( Compatible Time-Sharing System , BBN Time-Sharing System , and Dartmouth Time-Sharing System ). His colleague Lester Earnest told
726-460: A language others considered antiquated. New Lisp programmers often describe the language as an eye-opening experience and claim to be substantially more productive than in other languages. This increase in awareness may be contrasted to the " AI winter " and Lisp's brief gain in the mid-1990s. As of 2010 , there were eleven actively maintained Common Lisp implementations. The open source community has created new supporting infrastructure: CLiki
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#1732855860892792-579: A list, so the expression evaluates to the list ( 1 2 foo ) . The "quote" before the foo in the preceding example is a "special operator" which returns its argument without evaluating it. Any unquoted expressions are recursively evaluated before the enclosing expression is evaluated. For example, evaluates to the list ( 1 2 ( 3 4 )) . The third argument is a list; lists can be nested. Arithmetic operators are treated similarly. The expression John McCarthy (computer scientist) John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011)
858-445: A metaobject system. Many years later, Alan Kay suggested that as a result of the confluence of these features, only Smalltalk and Lisp could be regarded as properly conceived object-oriented programming systems. Lisp introduced the concept of automatic garbage collection , in which the system walks the heap looking for unused memory. Progress in modern sophisticated garbage collection algorithms such as generational garbage collection
924-578: A paper in Communications of the ACM in April 1960, entitled "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I". He showed that with a few simple operators and a notation for anonymous functions borrowed from Church, one can build a Turing-complete language for algorithms. Information Processing Language was the first AI language, from 1955 or 1956, and already included many of
990-499: A prefixed string from IC (in character) action. This medium borrows traits from both improvisational stage acting and writing. Roleplaying is one of the primary activities of MUSHes, along with socializing. There is nothing in the code base that restricts a new MUSH from being a traditional hack-and-slash MUD-style game. However, the earliest uses of MUSH servers were for roleplaying and socializing, and these early trends have largely governed their descendants. All MUSH servers provide
1056-728: A series of standards (Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme) and a series of Scheme Requests for Implementation . Clojure is a dialect of Lisp that targets mainly the Java virtual machine , and the Common Language Runtime (CLR), the Python VM, the Ruby VM YARV , and compiling to JavaScript . It is designed to be a pragmatic general-purpose language. Clojure draws considerable influences from Haskell and places
1122-510: A single language. The new language, Common Lisp , was somewhat compatible with the dialects it replaced (the book Common Lisp the Language notes the compatibility of various constructs). In 1994, ANSI published the Common Lisp standard, "ANSI X3.226-1994 Information Technology Programming Language Common Lisp". Since inception, Lisp was closely connected with the artificial intelligence research community, especially on PDP-10 systems. Lisp
1188-560: A speech given to celebrate MIT's centennial: that computer time-sharing technology might result in a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility business model (like water or electricity ). This idea of a computer or information utility was very popular during the late 1960s, but had faded by the mid-1990s. However, since 2000, the idea has resurfaced in new forms (see application service provider , grid computing , and cloud computing ). In 1966, McCarthy and his team at Stanford wrote
1254-437: A standard data structure—a quality much later dubbed " homoiconicity ". Thus, Lisp functions can be manipulated, altered or even created within a Lisp program without lower-level manipulations. This is generally considered one of the main advantages of the language with regard to its expressive power, and makes the language suitable for syntactic macros and meta-circular evaluation . A conditional using an if–then–else syntax
1320-427: A very strong emphasis on immutability. Clojure provides access to Java frameworks and libraries, with optional type hints and type inference , so that calls to Java can avoid reflection and enable fast primitive operations. Clojure is not designed to be backwards compatible with other Lisp dialects. Further, Lisp dialects are used as scripting languages in many applications, with the best-known being Emacs Lisp in
1386-808: Is a weekly news service, Weekly Lisp News . Common-lisp.net is a hosting site for open source Common Lisp projects. Quicklisp is a library manager for Common Lisp. Fifty years of Lisp (1958–2008) was celebrated at LISP50@OOPSLA. There are regular local user meetings in Boston, Vancouver, and Hamburg. Other events include the European Common Lisp Meeting, the European Lisp Symposium and an International Lisp Conference. The Scheme community actively maintains over twenty implementations . Several significant new implementations (Chicken, Gambit, Gauche, Ikarus, Larceny, Ypsilon) have been developed in
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#17328558608921452-520: Is a wiki that collects Common Lisp related information, the Common Lisp directory lists resources, #lisp is a popular IRC channel and allows the sharing and commenting of code snippets (with support by lisppaste , an IRC bot written in Lisp), Planet Lisp collects the contents of various Lisp-related blogs, on LispForum users discuss Lisp topics, Lispjobs is a service for announcing job offers and there
1518-481: Is doomed to talk nonsense"; his license plate cover read, similarly, "Do the arithmetic or be doomed to talk nonsense." He advised 30 PhD graduates. His 2001 short story "The Robot and the Baby" farcically explored the question of whether robots should have (or simulate having) emotions, and anticipated aspects of Internet culture and social networking that became increasingly prominent during ensuing decades. McCarthy
1584-565: Is implemented in Femtolisp, a dialect of Scheme (Julia is inspired by Scheme, which in turn is a Lisp dialect). In October 2019, Paul Graham released a specification for Bel , "a new dialect of Lisp." Common Lisp and Scheme represent two major streams of Lisp development. These languages embody significantly different design choices. Common Lisp is a successor to Maclisp . The primary influences were Lisp Machine Lisp , Maclisp, NIL , S-1 Lisp , Spice Lisp , and Scheme. It has many of
1650-480: Is intended for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into IBM 704 machine code, fixing bugs , and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today ... The result was a working Lisp interpreter which could be used to run Lisp programs, or more properly, "evaluate Lisp expressions". Two assembly language macros for
1716-421: Is particular interest in ensuring that common MUSHcode features work similarly across servers. PennMUSH, TinyMUSH, TinyMUX and RhostMUSH are all open-source MUSH servers Lisp programming language Lisp (historically LISP , an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation . Originally specified in
1782-507: Is written as s-expressions , or parenthesized lists. A function call or syntactic form is written as a list with the function or operator's name first, and the arguments following; for instance, a function f that takes three arguments would be called as ( f arg1 arg2 arg3 ) . John McCarthy began developing Lisp in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). McCarthy published its design in
1848-406: Is written with its elements separated by whitespace , and surrounded by parentheses. For example, ( 1 2 foo ) is a list whose elements are the three atoms 1 , 2 , and foo . These values are implicitly typed: they are respectively two integers and a Lisp-specific data type called a "symbol", and do not have to be declared as such. The empty list () is also represented as
1914-653: The Amalgamated Clothing Workers in Los Angeles, California . His father came from Cromane , a small fishing village in County Kerry , Ireland. His mother died in 1957. Both parents were active members of the Communist Party during the 1930s, and they encouraged learning and critical thinking. Before he attended high school, McCarthy became interested in science by reading a translation of 100,000 Whys ,
1980-686: The Emacs editor, AutoLISP and later Visual Lisp in AutoCAD , Nyquist in Audacity , and Scheme in LilyPond . The potential small size of a useful Scheme interpreter makes it particularly popular for embedded scripting. Examples include SIOD and TinyScheme , both of which have been successfully embedded in the GIMP image processor under the generic name "Script-fu". LIBREP, a Lisp interpreter by John Harper originally based on
2046-536: The Emacs Lisp language, has been embedded in the Sawfish window manager . Lisp has officially standardized dialects: R6RS Scheme , R7RS Scheme , IEEE Scheme, ANSI Common Lisp and ISO ISLISP . Paul Graham identifies nine important aspects of Lisp that distinguished it from existing languages like Fortran : Lisp was the first language where the structure of program code is represented faithfully and directly in
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2112-554: The IBM 704 became the primitive operations for decomposing lists: car ( Contents of the Address part of Register number) and cdr ( Contents of the Decrement part of Register number), where "register" refers to registers of the computer's central processing unit (CPU). Lisp dialects still use car and cdr ( / k ɑːr / and / ˈ k ʊ d ər / ) for the operations that return
2178-543: The LLVM , the Java virtual machine , x86-64, PowerPC, Alpha, ARM, Motorola 68000, and MIPS, and operating systems such as Windows, macOS, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Dragonfly BSD, and Heroku. Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language invented by Guy L. Steele, Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman . It was designed to have exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. Designed about
2244-486: The Lisp programming language . That functional programming seminal paper also introduced the lambda notation borrowed from the syntax of lambda calculus in which later dialects like Scheme based its semantics. Lisp soon became the programming language of choice for AI applications after its publication in 1960. In 1958, McCarthy served on an Association for Computing Machinery ad hoc committee on Languages that became part of
2310-482: The read–eval–print loop . The name LISP derives from "LISt Processor". Linked lists are one of Lisp's major data structures , and Lisp source code is made of lists. Thus, Lisp programs can manipulate source code as a data structure, giving rise to the macro systems that allow programmers to create new syntax or new domain-specific languages embedded in Lisp. The interchangeability of code and data gives Lisp its instantly recognizable syntax. All program code
2376-688: The 1971 Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI, the United States National Medal of Science , and the Kyoto Prize . John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts , on September 4, 1927, to an Irish immigrant father and a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant mother, John Patrick and Ida (Glatt) McCarthy. The family was obliged to relocate frequently during the Great Depression , until McCarthy's father found work as an organizer for
2442-473: The 2000s (decade). The Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme standard of Scheme was widely accepted in the Scheme community. The Scheme Requests for Implementation process has created a lot of quasi-standard libraries and extensions for Scheme. User communities of individual Scheme implementations continue to grow. A new language standardization process was started in 2003 and led to
2508-482: The 2010s. Lisp is an expression oriented language . Unlike most other languages, no distinction is made between "expressions" and "statements" ; all code and data are written as expressions. When an expression is evaluated , it produces a value (possibly multiple values), which can then be embedded into other expressions. Each value can be any data type. McCarthy's 1958 paper introduced two types of syntax: Symbolic expressions ( S-expressions , sexps), which mirror
2574-491: The Extensible Markup Language ( XML ). The reliance on expressions gives the language great flexibility. Because Lisp functions are written as lists, they can be processed exactly like data. This allows easy writing of programs which manipulate other programs ( metaprogramming ). Many Lisp dialects exploit this feature using macro systems, which enables extension of the language almost without limit. A Lisp list
2640-556: The Lisp model of incremental compilation , in which compiled and interpreted functions can intermix freely. The language used in Hart and Levin's memo is much closer to modern Lisp style than McCarthy's earlier code. Garbage collection routines were developed by MIT graduate student Daniel Edwards , prior to 1962. During the 1980s and 1990s, a great effort was made to unify the work on new Lisp dialects (mostly successors to Maclisp such as ZetaLisp and NIL (New Implementation of Lisp) into
2706-499: The Los Angeles Times: The Internet would not have happened nearly as soon as it did except for the fact that John initiated the development of time-sharing systems. We keep inventing new names for time-sharing. It came to be called servers ... Now we call it cloud computing. That is still just time-sharing. John started it. In 1961, he was perhaps the first to suggest publicly the idea of utility computing , in
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2772-467: The MUSH server itself is written) was developed by Larry Foard. TinyMUSH started life as a set of enhancements to the original TinyMUD code. "MUSHcode" is similar in syntax to Lisp . Traditionally, roleplay consists of a series of "poses". Each character makes a "pose" – that is, writes a description of speech, actions, etc. which the character performs. Special commands allow players to print OOC (out of character) messages, distinguished by
2838-470: The R RS Scheme standard in 2007. Academic use of Scheme for teaching computer science seems to have declined somewhat. Some universities are no longer using Scheme in their computer science introductory courses; MIT now uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate computer science program and MITx massive open online course. There are several new dialects of Lisp: Arc , Hy , Nu , Liskell , and LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang). The parser for Julia
2904-456: The S-expression syntax is also responsible for much of Lisp's power: the syntax is simple and consistent, which facilitates manipulation by computer. However, the syntax of Lisp is not limited to traditional parentheses notation. It can be extended to include alternative notations. For example, XMLisp is a Common Lisp extension that employs the metaobject protocol to integrate S-expressions with
2970-586: The committee that designed ALGOL 60 . In August 1959 he proposed the use of recursion and conditional expressions, which became part of ALGOL. He then became involved with developing international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which specified , maintains, and supports ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68 . Around 1959, he invented so-called " garbage collection " methods,
3036-596: The concepts, such as list-processing and recursion, which came to be used in Lisp. McCarthy's original notation used bracketed " M-expressions " that would be translated into S-expressions . As an example, the M-expression car[cons[A,B]] is equivalent to the S-expression ( car ( cons A B )) . Once Lisp was implemented, programmers rapidly chose to use S-expressions, and M-expressions were abandoned. M-expressions surfaced again with short-lived attempts of MLisp by Horace Enea and CGOL by Vaughan Pratt . Lisp
3102-418: The core theme of an S-expression language. Moreover, each given dialect may have several implementations—for instance, there are more than a dozen implementations of Common Lisp . Differences between dialects may be quite visible—for instance, Common Lisp uses the keyword defun to name a function, but Scheme uses define . Within a dialect that is standardized, however, conforming implementations support
3168-596: The features of Lisp Machine Lisp (a large Lisp dialect used to program Lisp Machines ), but was designed to be efficiently implementable on any personal computer or workstation. Common Lisp is a general-purpose programming language and thus has a large language standard including many built-in data types, functions, macros and other language elements, and an object system ( Common Lisp Object System ). Common Lisp also borrowed certain features from Scheme such as lexical scoping and lexical closures . Common Lisp implementations are available for targeting different platforms such as
3234-415: The first item in a list and the rest of the list, respectively. The first complete Lisp compiler, written in Lisp, was implemented in 1962 by Tim Hart and Mike Levin at MIT, and could be compiled by simply having an existing LISP interpreter interpret the compiler code, producing machine code output able to be executed at a 40-fold improvement in speed over that of the interpreter. This compiler introduced
3300-504: The internal representation of code and data; and Meta expressions ( M-expressions ), which express functions of S-expressions. M-expressions never found favor, and almost all Lisps today use S-expressions to manipulate both code and data. The use of parentheses is Lisp's most immediately obvious difference from other programming language families. As a result, students have long given Lisp nicknames such as Lost In Stupid Parentheses , or Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses . However,
3366-457: The late 1950s, it is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common use, after Fortran . Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history. Today, the best-known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp , Scheme , Racket , and Clojure . Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs , influenced by (though not originally derived from)
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#17328558608923432-415: The notation of Alonzo Church 's lambda calculus . It quickly became a favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science , including tree data structures , automatic storage management , dynamic typing , conditionals , higher-order functions , recursion , the self-hosting compiler , and
3498-450: The outward force of a stream of pellets propelled from Earth along a sort of conveyor belt which returns the pellets to Earth. Payloads would ride the conveyor belt upward. McCarthy often commented on world affairs on the Usenet forums. Some of his ideas can be found in his sustainability Web page, which is "aimed at showing that human material progress is desirable and sustainable". McCarthy
3564-474: The same core language, but with different extensions and libraries. After having declined somewhat in the 1990s, Lisp has experienced a resurgence of interest after 2000. Most new activity has been focused around implementations of Common Lisp , Scheme , Emacs Lisp , Clojure , and Racket , and includes development of new portable libraries and applications. Many new Lisp programmers were inspired by writers such as Paul Graham and Eric S. Raymond to pursue
3630-406: The special atom nil . This is the only entity in Lisp which is both an atom and a list. Expressions are written as lists, using prefix notation . The first element in the list is the name of a function, the name of a macro, a lambda expression or the name of a "special operator" (see below). The remainder of the list are the arguments. For example, the function list returns its arguments as
3696-515: The term "artificial intelligence" in a proposal that they wrote for the famous Dartmouth conference in Summer 1956. This conference started AI as a field. (Minsky later joined McCarthy at MIT in 1959.) In 1958, he proposed the advice taker , which inspired later work on question-answering and logic programming . In the late 1950s, McCarthy discovered that primitive recursive functions could be extended to compute with symbolic expressions, producing
3762-621: The textbooks used at the nearby California Institute of Technology (Caltech). As a result, he was able to skip the first two years of math at Caltech. He was suspended from Caltech for failure to attend physical education courses. He then served in the US Army and was readmitted, receiving a Bachelor of Science ( BS ) in mathematics in 1948. It was at Caltech that he attended a lecture by John von Neumann that inspired his future endeavors. McCarthy completed his graduate studies at Caltech before moving to Princeton University , where he received
3828-595: Was already affectionately referred to as "Uncle John" by his students. In 1962, he became a full professor at Stanford, where he remained until his retirement in 2000. McCarthy championed mathematics such as lambda calculus and invented logics for achieving common sense in artificial intelligence. John McCarthy is one of the "founding fathers" of artificial intelligence, together with Alan Turing , Marvin Minsky , Allen Newell , and Herbert A. Simon . McCarthy, Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude E. Shannon coined
3894-508: Was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist . He was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence . He co-authored the document that coined the term " artificial intelligence " (AI), developed the programming language family Lisp , significantly influenced the design of the language ALGOL , popularized time-sharing , and invented garbage collection . McCarthy spent most of his career at Stanford University . He received many accolades and honors, such as
3960-551: Was an avid book reader, an optimist, and a staunch supporter of free speech. His best Usenet interaction is visible in rec.arts.books archives. He actively attended San Francisco (SF) Bay Area dinners in Palo Alto of r.a.b. readers, called rab-fests. He went on to defend free speech criticism involving European ethnic jokes at Stanford. McCarthy saw the importance of mathematics and mathematics education. His Usenet signature block ( .sig) for years was, "He who refuses to do arithmetic
4026-404: Was first implemented by Steve Russell on an IBM 704 computer using punched cards . Russell had read McCarthy's paper and realized (to McCarthy's surprise) that the Lisp eval function could be implemented in machine code . According to McCarthy Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval ... and I said to him, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval
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#17328558608924092-420: Was influenced by Smalltalk, with later dialects adopting object-oriented programming features (inheritance classes, encapsulating instances, message passing, etc.) in the 1970s. The Flavors object system introduced the concept of multiple inheritance and the mixin . The Common Lisp Object System provides multiple inheritance, multimethods with multiple dispatch , and first-class generic functions , yielding
4158-502: Was invented by McCarthy for a chess program written in Fortran . He proposed its inclusion in ALGOL , but it was not made part of the Algol 58 specification. For Lisp, McCarthy used the more general cond -structure. Algol 60 took up if–then–else and popularized it. Lisp deeply influenced Alan Kay , the leader of the research team that developed Smalltalk at Xerox PARC ; and in turn Lisp
4224-446: Was married three times. His second wife was Vera Watson , a programmer and mountaineer who died in 1978 attempting to scale Annapurna I Central as part of an all-women expedition . He later married Carolyn Talcott , a computer scientist at Stanford and later Scientific Research Institute (SRI) International . McCarthy declared himself an atheist in a speech about artificial intelligence at Stanford Memorial Church . Raised as
4290-433: Was stimulated by its use in Lisp. Edsger W. Dijkstra in his 1972 Turing Award lecture said, With a few very basic principles at its foundation, it [LISP] has shown a remarkable stability. Besides that, LISP has been the carrier for a considerable number of in a sense our most sophisticated computer applications. LISP has jokingly been described as "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description
4356-454: Was used as the implementation of the language Micro Planner , which was used in the famous AI system SHRDLU . In the 1970s, as AI research spawned commercial offshoots, the performance of existing Lisp systems became a growing issue, as programmers needed to be familiar with the performance ramifications of the various techniques and choices involved in the implementation of Lisp. Over its sixty-year history, Lisp has spawned many variations on
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