Paul Rubin wrote:
So true, there was indeed a contextual reason for special hardware, and the context has since changed (dramatically)....
OK, then give me an example of Lisp OS that runs on a PC. I would like to
install it on my PC tomorrow. Or maybe my Mac. That was your whole point,
originally, that since it could be done in Lisp, why not Python?
Huh? That's a non-sequitur, nothing prevents you from running Lisp on your PC or Mac. The same issues issues that apply to OS code, also apply to user code. The Lisp machine hardware wasn't needed only to make the OS run fast. The Lisp machine was developed so that people could deploy large user-level applications written in Lisp, and the hardware was there to support those applications. And given such a good Lisp environment, there was no reason to think of writing the OS in anything other than Lisp.
In fact, the reason the Lisp machine died off was because general
purpose workstation hardware (and later, PC-class hardware) became
fast enough to run Lisp applications without needing special purpose
CPU's. That same PC hardware speed is what makes it possible to run
user applications in Python.
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