Wikipedia page

[Waldek Hebisch]

On FriCAS Wikipedia page there is claim that Scratchpad (initial
IBM project) was written in Fortran. I wander what is the
source of this claim. All texts about Scratchpad say that
it was written in Lisp (IIUC VMLISP was created as part of
computer algebra project at IBM, before the project was named
Scratchpad).

--
Waldek Hebisch

[Tim Daly]

I was actively involved in translating Scratchpad from VMLISP to about

a dozen different lisps, then eventually to Common Lisp. I am unaware

of any Fortran code. Some of the Scratchpad code was translated from

MIT's Lisp. There was a Meta language developed by Dick Jenks which

was compiled first in order to create the parser. I removed the Meta

language and its compiler.

The ultimate target became AKCL, Austin Kyoto Common Lisp, now GCL.

I worked on the garbage collector, tail recursion, and a bunch of Common

Lisp compatibility issues. I minimally, and usually second-hand behind

Fred Blair, was on the Common Lisp mailing list so I was carefully evaluating

the AKCL compatibility.

The only possible connection to Fortran was my effort to translate the

BLAS and LAPACK libraries to Common Lisp. The translation result is 

part of the Axiom repository and was done during the open source effort.

NAG also made a connection to their Fortran libraries but that was after

it left IBM.

If there is a Scratchpad / Fortran connection that is a surprise to me.

Tim Daly