Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site bu-cs.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!mhuxn!mhuxm!sftig!sftri!sfmag!eagle!ulysses!unc!mcnc!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!bu-cs!hen From: hen@bu-cs.UUCP (Bill Henneman) Newsgroups: net.ai Subject: Re: Thus spake the DoD... Message-ID: <215@bu-cs.UUCP> Date: Fri, 8-Mar-85 12:40:25 EST Article-I.D.: bu-cs.215 Posted: Fri Mar 8 12:40:25 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 11-Mar-85 04:13:53 EST References: <313@wdl1.UUCP>, <215@rtech.ARPA> Organization: Boston Univ Comp. Sci. Lines: 15 I think it would be a *rare* piece of Lisp code that could be run without most of the functionality of LISP at run time: all of the implimentations I am familiar with ensure that anything that builds list structure funnel through a call to CONS. CONS uses an implicit assumption of a LISP garbage collector present when the CONS can't find space. But once you have the memory management routines (and all that they imply) resident at run time, you have come so close to having a LISP, you might as well throw in the rest (READ is the only other hairy thing to write). I have been faced with this issue in conjunction with an automatic code-porting project I have been working on this year; my current state is that I believe one can write systems to take code in any compiled language and produce equivalent LISP code, but that converting in the opposite direction is not economically feasible.