History of XLISP

[Strong datatypes for weak minds.]

I've always wanted to get the history of XLISP straight. I'm a
long-time V1.1 hacker, but have yet to move on because it's
smaller, easier to understand, and is portable between everything
I support (DECstuff) and in my flock (includes CP/M-80).

Is this much of the timeline accurate ? Can anyone fill in some
of the holes ?

V1.0 DECUS C (PDT-11/150, RT-11 V?.?), inspired by MacLisp ?
V1.1 1983. Ported to K&R, placed in the PD and submitted to
DECUS, BCS, SIG/M.
V1.2 Renamed things to Common Lisp usage; Byte article; CP/M
V1.4 Death to 8-bit machines.
V1.5 ? (I found a CP/M binary for a "tiny XLISP" once.)
V1.7 Macs, PCs, etal.
V2.0 ?
V2.1 Almy ?
...
...
0.18 XSCHEME
0.22 ...
...
...
V3.0 ?

[David Betz]

Version 2.0 of XLISP was the first version that supported separate name
spaces for functions and values (a bad decision in my opinion) to be
compatible with Common Lisp. Version 2.1 added limited support for
defstruct and fixed a few bugs in 2.0.

The current version of XScheme is 0.28. I'm working on 0.41, but it
will probably never be released because it's likely to turn into
XLISP 3.0. Unfortunately, I can't really release it yet because it
doesn't support many of the special forms that even XLISP 1.7 supported.
Conspicuous things that are missing are unwind-protect, catch/throw,
block/return-from, tagbody/go. I suppose I should get those added
before I subject the world to this latest hack. Also, XLISP 3.0
currently supports only a single namespace. It is really more like
XLISP 1.7 and XScheme than XLISP 2.0 or 2.1. It does have packages and
multiple values though.

David Betz