On 17 Jan 2008, at 12:31 pm, Achim Schneider wrote:
Lisp is actually not really meant to be compiled, but interpreted.
The "classic" Lisp is Lisp 1.5. The Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual, published in I think 1961, contains "Appendix D: The Lisp Compiler". If I'm reading appendix G correctly, the compiler was under 4000 words of storage.
The nice thing is that it doesn't need more than a handful of primitives, a list parser and heap manager/garbage collector and evaluator, which all can be implemented in under 1000 lines of C. Things get more involved with get/cc, but then how many C programmers ever heard of setjmp...
I have no idea what get/cc might be, unless it is a mistake for call/cc, but that's Scheme, not Lisp. "Classic" Lisp stack management wasn't really any harder than Pascal stack management (in part because classic Lisps were still struggling to get closures right).