Introduction

[Scott L. Burson]

Hi all,

A brief intro...  I was one of the early users of LispMs at MIT in 1979.
Starting in 1984 and continuing through mid-1987 I developed and was selling
Zeta-C, the first C implementation for LispMs; so I know a lot about compiling
C into Lisp (if anyone cares :-).  (Oh yes, as you might guess, the "Zeta" in
"Zeta-Soft" comes from "Zetalisp".)  Since then I have done a lot of work in a
language called Refine which is built on top of Allegro Common Lisp.  So I've
used Lisp, in one form or another, on a daily basis for most of my career.  I
own a 3620 (I used to own an LMI CADR, but gave it away after I moved across
the country and didn't want to transport it).  I also have a broad background
in programming language semantics and implementation.  The work I've been
doing for most of the last decade is software reengineering -- the automated
analysis and transformation of source code.

Garbage collection and persistence have long been interests of mine.  I've
always thought that lack of persistence was the grand flaw of the LispM.  I
will have a lot more to say about persistence in a subsequent message.

I will also (not necessarily this week) submit to the list a position paper
describing what I would like to see in a Lisp OS, and how I would go about
building it.

I'm not going to be able to put much time into this project, but perhaps I can
contribute some valuable ideas.

-- Scott