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Not really. None of the relevant (= you could buy them and use them) Lisp Machines did not evaluate Lisp forms - the evaluator was a program, too. They all used a processor which provided a special instruction set and Lisp datastructures. For example the processor of the Symbolics Lisp Machine was a mostly stack machine running compiled Lisp code. You can compare it to running JVM instructions in hardware. Thus the Symbolics Lisp Machine had C, Ada, Pascal and other languages implemented for it.


Hmmm, as I recall eval was in microcode.

But so as I recall was the virtual machine that interpreted the bytecodes the compiler produced.

Here I'm referring to what I remember being told about the CADR's microcode (it had a LOT, with options for more if you were willing to buy more $$$ static RAM), but the others were all direct descendants and I gather did pretty much the same things.


Most of the code on the Lisp machine was compiled. An interpreter, which would evaluate source code was rarely used.




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