Programming Research Group Technical Monograph PRG-32

Peter Henderson, Geraint A Jones and Simon B Jones

1983, 2volumes [127 and 136 pages], ISBN 0-902928-18-X

LispKit is the portable implementation technique for a purely functional programming language, LispKit Lisp. The implementation consists of a small virtual machine, and a corpus of language support software, itself written in LispKit Lisp. It is the size and simplicity of the virtual machine which gives the implementation its portability.

The language is a dialect of the Lisp language and shares two of the most powerful features of that language: the universal structured type, the list; and s-expression syntax which is both expressive and easily manipulated by program. It differs from full Lisp in that all LispKit programs must be written in a functional style, since there are no language primitives for updating data structures. The absence of destructive assignment greatly improves the intelligibility of programs, and is held to improve programmer productivity, by simplifying the creation and maintenance of correct programs.

The first volume consists of a brief introduction to the language, and to some of the existing implementations of the system, together with a note about each of the software components of the system. The second volume contains copies of all the Lispkit Lisp programs and libraries as they were being distributed by the authors at the time of going to press, together with the text of an implementation of the virtual machine which supports the LispKit system.

The software described in this monograph is available by anonymous ftp from ftp.comlab.ox.ac.uk in the directory /pub/Packages/LispKit