Franz Lisp
4.3 BSD from theUniversity of Wisconsin, displaying a Franz Lispman page
Paradigms	Multi-paradigm:functional,procedural,reflective,meta
Family	Lisp
Designed by	Richard Fateman, John Foderaro, Kevin Layer, Keith Sklower
Developer	University of California, Berkeley
First appeared	1980; 46 years ago (1980)
Final release	Final / 1988; 38 years ago (1988)
Typing discipline	Dynamic,strong
Scope	Static, lexical
Implementation language	C, Franz Lisp
Platform	VAX,68000
OS	VMS,Unix,Unix-like,Eunice,SunOS
License	Proprietary,freeware
Influenced by
Lisp,Maclisp,Common Lisp
Influenced
Allegro Common Lisp

Incomputer programming,Franz Lisp is a discontinuedLisp programming language system written at theUniversity of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, UCB) by ProfessorRichard Fateman and several students, based largely onMaclisp and distributed with theBerkeley Software Distribution (BSD) for theDigital Equipment Corporation (DEC)VAX minicomputer.^[1] Piggybacking on the popularity of the BSD package, Franz Lisp was probably the most widely distributed and used Lisp system of the 1970s and 1980s.^[2]

The name is a pun on the composer and pianistFranz Liszt.

It was written specifically to be a host for running theMacsymacomputer algebra system on VAX. The project began at the end of 1978, soon after UC Berkeley took delivery of their first VAX 11/780 (named Ernie CoVax, afterErnie Kovacs, the first of many systems with pun names at UCB). Franz Lisp was availablefree of charge to educational sites, and was also distributed onEunice, a BerkeleyUnixemulator that ran onVAXVMS.

At the time of Franz Lisp's creation, the Macsyma computer algebra system ran mainly on a DECPDP-10. This computer's limited address space caused difficulties. Attempted remedies includedports of Maclisp toMultics orLisp machines, but even if successful, these would only be solutions for theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as these machines were costly and uncommon. Franz Lisp was the first example of a framework where largeLisp programs could be run outside the Lisp machines environment; Macsyma was then considered a very large program. After being ported to Franz Lisp, Macsyma was distributed to about 50 sites under a license restricted by MIT's interest in making Macsymaproprietary. The VAX Macsyma that ran on Franz Lisp was called Vaxima. WhenSymbolics Inc., bought the commercial rights to Macsyma from MIT to sell along with its Lisp machines, it eventually was compelled to sell Macsyma also on DEC VAX andSun Microsystems computers, paying royalties to theUniversity of California for the use of Franz Lisp.

Other Lisp implementations for the VAX were MIT'sNIL (never fully functional), University of Utah'sPortable Standard Lisp, DEC's VAX Lisp, Xerox'sInterlisp-VAX, andLe Lisp.

In 1982, the port of Franz Lisp to theMotorola 68000 processor was begun. In particular, it was ported to a prototype Sun-1 made bySun Microsystems, which ran a variant ofBerkeley Software Distribution (BSD)Unix calledSunOS. In 1986, atPurdue University, Franz Lisp was ported to theCCI Power 6/32 platform, code namedTahoe.

The major contributors to Franz Lisp at UC Berkeley were John K. Foderaro, Keith Sklower, and Kevin Layer.

A company was formed to provide support for Franz Lisp called Franz Inc., by foundersRichard Fateman, John Foderaro, Fritz Kunze, Kevin Layer, and Keith Sklower, all associated with UC Berkeley. After that, development and research on Franz Lisp continued for a few years, but the acceptance ofCommon Lisp greatly reduced the need for Franz Lisp. The first product of Franz Inc. was Franz Lisp running on variousMotorola 68000-based workstations. A port of Franz Lisp was even done to VAX VMS forLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. However, almost immediately Franz Inc. began work on their implementation of Common Lisp,Allegro Common Lisp.

The Franz Lispinterpreter was written inC and Franz Lisp. It was bootstrapped solely using the C compiler. The Franz Lisp compiler, written entirely in Franz Lisp, was called Liszt, completing the pun on the name of the composerFranz Liszt.

Some notable features of Franz Lisp were arrays in Lisp interchangeable with arrays inFortran and aforeign function interface (FFI) which allowed interoperation with other languages at the binary level. Many of the implementation methods were borrowed from Maclisp: bibop memory organization (BIg Bag Of Pages), small integers represented uniquely by pointers to fixed values in fields, and fast arithmetic.

• Franz Lisp was used as the example language in Robert Wilensky's first edition ofLispcraft
• An implementation ofOPS5 by DEC on Franz Lisp was used as the basis for arule-based system for configuringVAX-11 computer system orders and was important to DEC's sales of these computers
• Slang: acircuit simulator used to design and test thereduced instruction set computer RISC-I microprocessor
• As a derivative: Cadence Design SystemsSkill programming language

• PC-LISP is an implementation of Franz Lisp forMS-DOS which still runs on emulators andWindows.

• Franz Lisp Opus 38.92 for VAX source code
• other Franz Lisp resources
• Franz Lisp atHistory of LISP

• Lisp programming language family
• University of California, Berkeley
• Franz Liszt

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata