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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.