Book review: LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual (1962)
Channel: Alone in the Kitchen — by Nino Ivanov
Date: 01/12/2022

A #review of John #McCarthy  & alii's description of #LISP 1.5 (for the #IBM #7090), one of the first broader descriptions of the then still very new LISP language. Your interpreter, or in the authors' parlance, "overlord" (a term we really need to reintroduce for the LISP REPL!), was EVALQUOTE, expecting a program to be a list of pairs of S-expressions, the first one a functor, the second one a list of arguments, the GO command could only goto in the same PROG level, MAPCAR was not invented yet, and besides PRINT and PRIN1, the system knew PUNCH, while pterodactyls soared through the ashen skies...