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| ▲ | WorldMaker 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | MDL is what was in wide use at MIT at the time, the PDP-10 era. The M in MDL is sometimes "MIT" in the various backronyms of what it stood for. (Mostly it was apparently just short for "muddle", a self-deprecating description.) (Also, to be technically correct, these source files aren't even MDL, they are a further descendant called ZIL [Zork Implementation Language].) | |
| ▲ | staplung 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | MDL is also from MIT and supposedly stood for More Datatypes than Lisp. According to wikipedia "MDL provides several enhancements to classic Lisp. It supports several built-in data types, including lists, strings and arrays, and user-defined data types. It offers multithreaded expression evaluation and coroutines." Seems that most of it's novelties were eventually added into LISP proper. | |
| ▲ | jjtheblunt 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | maybe they just made a mini-lisp and called it MDL? | | |
| ▲ | drob518 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s very Lispy, but it’s not strictly Lisp. Why, for instance, use “<“ and “>” to surround various forms but not others? If they were to make a mini-Lisp, I’d expect something more like Gnu Emacs Lisp, something that’s obviously a Lisp, but heavily influenced by the Lisps of the day. I’ve found a few old MDL manuals linked from Wikipedia, but none of them have any sort of “Here’s why we created MDL” section that I could find. | | |
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