Lisp (programming Language) - Language Innovations

Language Innovations

Lisp was the first homoiconic programming language: the primary representation of program code is the same type of list structure that is also used for the main data structures. As a result, Lisp functions can be manipulated, altered or even created within a Lisp program without extensive parsing or manipulation of binary machine code. This is generally considered one of the primary advantages of the language with regard to its expressive power, and makes the language amenable to metacircular evaluation.

The ubiquitous if-then-else structure, now taken for granted as an essential element of any programming language, was invented by McCarthy for use in Lisp, where it saw its first appearance in a more general form (the cond structure). It was inherited by ALGOL, which popularized it.

Lisp deeply influenced Alan Kay, the leader of the research on Smalltalk, and then in turn Lisp was influenced by Smalltalk, by adopting object-oriented programming features (classes, instances, etc.) in the late 1970s. The Flavours object system (later CLOS) introduced multiple inheritance.

Lisp introduced the concept of automatic garbage collection, in which the system walks the heap looking for unused memory. Most of the modern sophisticated garbage collection algorithms such as generational garbage collection were developed for Lisp.

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. Newer languages such as Java and Python have incorporated some limited versions of some of the features of Lisp, but are necessarily unable to bring the coherence and synergy of the full concepts found in Lisp. Because of its suitability to complex and dynamic applications, Lisp is currently enjoying some resurgence of popular interest.