From ... From: Erik Naggum Subject: Re: Lisp is alive, was "Re: Common LISP: The Next Generation" Date: 1996/09/08 Message-ID: <3051169529237741@arcana.naggum.no>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 179236815 sender: erik@arcana.naggum.no references: <841563547snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk> <841843502snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk> organization: Naggum Software; +47 2295 0313; http://www.naggum.no newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.dylan,comp.lang.scheme [Rainer Joswig] | RPL is the programming language for HP28 and HP48. Guess what RPL | stands for. Reverse Polish Lisp? [Robert Sanders] | You're reaching. RPL is very similar to Forth, and has almost nothing | in common with Lisp. I wish it did. hmmm. the only similarity to Forth I remember is the stack representation of arguments and return values. one might as well say PostScript. I have also heard that RPL stands for Reverse Polish Lisp internally to HP, and it's not a joke. I wrote a fair amount of code in System RPL a few years back (the internal language, related to RPL like Emacs Lisp to Emacs' commands). RPL has dynamic types, type dispatch, garbage collection, many functions with Lispy names, lambda forms (local variables), etc. it also has a number of features that are not lispy at all, and which _could_ be used to contradict any assessment of RPL as "Lispy". #\Erik -- those who do not know Lisp are doomed to reimplement it