2024 Medley Interlisp Annual Report

1 year ago (interlisp.org)

It is great that Interlisp-D is being kept running, and kudos to everyone making it happen.

Almost everyone knows about Smalltalk, yet there are lots of interesting stuff coming out of Interlisp-D, Mesa (XDE) and Mesa/Cedar, which also deserve more widespread knowledge.

> We identified discrepancies in Medley’s Common Lisp implementation by testing against the examples in Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel.

Huh? While PCL is a great introduction text with practical examples, I doubt its suitability as ANSI CL standard compliance benchmark; it surely wasn't meant as such. Why not use Paul Dietz's ANSI test suite?

https://github.com/pfdietz/ansi-test

  • The tests against Seibel's book were meant as a quick way of assessing the major differences with ANSI. But books like this are also a way of exercising the part of the language that is used in practice. We do mean to follow up with more in depth investigations, such as running a test suite like Dietz's.