ISLISP

ISLISP (also capitalized as ISLisp) is a programming language in the Lisp family standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) joint working group ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 16 (commonly termed simply SC22/WG16 or WG16). The primary output of this working group was an international standard, published by ISO. The standard was updated in 2007 and republished as ISO/IEC 13816:2007(E). Although official publication was through ISO, versions of the ISLISP language specification are available that are believed to be in the public domain.

The goal of this standards effort was to define a small, core language to help bridge the gap between differing dialects of Lisp. It attempted to accomplish this goal by studying primarily Common Lisp, EuLisp, Le Lisp, and Scheme and standardizing only those features shared between them.

19581960196519701975198019851990199520002005201020152020
 LISP 1, 1.5, LISP 2(abandoned)
 Maclisp
 Interlisp
 MDL
 Lisp Machine Lisp
 Scheme R5RS R6RS R7RS small
 NIL
 ZIL (Zork Implementation Language)
 Franz Lisp
 muLisp
 Common Lisp ANSI standard
 Le Lisp
 MIT Scheme
 XLISP
 T
 Chez Scheme
 Emacs Lisp
 AutoLISP
 PicoLisp
 Gambit
 EuLisp
 ISLISP
 OpenLisp
 PLT Scheme Racket
 newLISP
 GNU Guile
 Visual LISP
 Clojure
 Arc
 LFE
 Hy

Design goals

ISLISP has these design goals:

  • Compatible with extant Lisp dialects where feasible
  • Provide basic functionality
  • Object-oriented
  • Design for extensibility
  • Prioritize industrial needs over academic needs
  • Promote efficient implementations and applications

ISLISP has separate function and variable namespaces (hence it is a Lisp-2).

ISLISP's object system, ILOS, is mostly a subset of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS).

Major differences from Common Lisp

  • There is a global lexical variable. (defglobal)
  • Dynamic variable is explicit. (dynamic)
  • Keywords are not self-evaluating.
  • Destructuring is not supported in defmacro.

Implementations

ISLISP implementations have been made for many operating systems including: Windows, most Unix and POSIX based (Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Cygwin, QNX), Android, DOS, OS/2, Pocket PC, OpenVMS, and z/OS.

Implementations for hardware computer architectures include: x86, x86-64, IA-64, SPARC, SPARC9, PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, ARM, AArch64

Two older implementations are no longer available:

  • TISL, by Masato Izumi and Takayasu Ito (Tohoku University), was an interpreter and compiler.
  • G-LISP, by Josef Jelinek, was a Java applet.

References

Uses material from the Wikipedia article ISLISP, released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.