I was actively involved in translating Scratchpad from VMLISP to about
a dozen different lisps, then eventually to Common Lisp. I am unaware
of any Fortran code. Some of the Scratchpad code was translated from
MIT's Lisp. There was a Meta language developed by Dick Jenks which
was compiled first in order to create the parser. I removed the Meta
language and its compiler.

The ultimate target became AKCL, Austin Kyoto Common Lisp, now GCL.
I worked on the garbage collector, tail recursion, and a bunch of Common
Lisp compatibility issues. I minimally, and usually second-hand behind
Fred Blair, was on the Common Lisp mailing list so I was carefully 
evaluating
the AKCL compatibility. 

The only possible connection to Fortran was my effort to translate the
BLAS and LAPACK libraries to Common Lisp. The translation result is 
part of the Axiom repository and was done during the open source effort.

NAG also made a connection to their Fortran libraries but that was after
it left IBM.

If there is a Scratchpad / Fortran connection that is a surprise to me.

Tim Daly

On Sunday, June 8, 2025 at 5:02:11 PM UTC-4 Waldek Hebisch wrote:

> On FriCAS Wikipedia page there is claim that Scratchpad (initial
> IBM project) was written in Fortran. I wander what is the
> source of this claim. All texts about Scratchpad say that
> it was written in Lisp (IIUC VMLISP was created as part of
> computer algebra project at IBM, before the project was named
> Scratchpad).
>
> -- 
> Waldek Hebisch
>

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