Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site kcl-cs.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!seismo!mcvax!ukc!kcl-cs!malcolm From: malcolm@kcl-cs.UUCP (Malcolm Shute.) Newsgroups: net.lang Subject: Re: levelheight Message-ID: <463@kcl-cs.UUCP> Date: Tue, 15-Jan-85 17:18:28 EST Article-I.D.: kcl-cs.463 Posted: Tue Jan 15 17:18:28 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 18-Jan-85 03:24:13 EST References: <2673@dartvax.UUCP> <4890@utzoo.UUCP> <247@gumby.UUCP> <369@hercules.UUCP> Reply-To: malcolm@kcl-cs.UUCP (Malcolm Shute.) Organization: King's College Dept. of Computing, Westfield College, London, England Lines: 22 Summary: First of all, may I apologise if this item does not actually say anything which has not already been said. However, I thought it was worth noting that Lisp really is just a low level language. There are many higher level functional programming languages (SASL, Hope, KRC, Sugar etc.) which look more like high level imperative languages (Pascal, Ada etc.). Lisp really is the assembler language of functional programming, with combinator code (Schoenfinkel, Turner etc.) forming a very good object code for multi-processor functional processors. Here at Kings College London, we are designing (or attempting to design) just such a machine for wafer-scale integration. [Spot the plug for our own work there.] However, having said all of that, I remember someone noting in this group that an 8080 would look on a 32-bit machine's assembler as a relatively high level language, by comparisson with its own assembler. Similarly, Lisp is higher in level than most of the current imperative (e.g. von Neumann) machine assemblers. In effect, running a Lisp interpretter on a conventional machine really amounts to running a simulator for a functional machine on the conventional one, and then writing programs in the functional one's assembler language.