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*Lisp (orStarLisp) is aprogramming language, adialect of the languageLisp.^[1] It was conceived of in 1985 by two employees of theThinking Machines Corporation, Cliff Lasser andSteve Omohundro, as a way to provide an efficient yet high-level language for programming the nascentConnection Machine (CM).

At the time the Connection Machine was being designed and built, the only language being actively developed for it was anassembly-level language named PARIS (ParallelInstructionSet). It became evident that a better way to program the machine was needed, and quickly. Waiting for the completion ofConnection Machine Lisp (CM Lisp), an implementation of thevery high-level programming languageLisp withparallel computing extensions, was not an option. CM Lisp had been proposed byDanny Hillis, and development was expected to continue for several more years.

A *Lispinterpreter was initially developed. It became apparent quickly that a *Lispcompiler, translating *Lisp intoLisp and PARIS, would be needed to attain the gigaFLOPS speed that was attainable in theory by a Connection Machine. The *Lisp compiler was written by Jeff Mincy and was first released in 1986. An application achieving more than two gigaFLOPS, a helicopter wake simulator, was developed by Alan Egolf, then an employee ofUnited Technologies, and J. P. Massar, a Thinking Machines employee, in 1987.^[2]

A *Lisp Simulator, anemulator meant to run *Lisp code on standard, non-parallel machines, was developed at the same time by J. P. Massar. This simulator still exists^[3] and was ported toAmerican National Standards Institute (ANSI)Common Lisp (CL) in 2001. An older version, written in the original CL, exists in theCarnegie Mellon University (CMU)artificial intelligence (AI) repository.^[4]

Later versions of *Lisp, involving significant upgrades to its functions and performance, were worked on by Cliff Lasser, Jeff Mincy, and J. P. Massar through 1989. *Lisp was implemented on the Thinking Machines CM5 circa 1990–1991 by J. P. Massar and Mario Bourgoin.

StarLisp was written onCommon Lisp (CL) and thus had the full power of CL behind it. To use a Connection Machine, one needed a host orfront-end. To use *Lisp, that front-end had to run CL.Symbolics's machines usingGenera andSun Microsystems workstations runningLucid Inc.'s Lucid Common Lisp were both used to operate *Lisp.

StarLisp operated onParallelVariables (PVARS). These represented Connection Machine memory and were essentiallyvectors: one element per CM processor (or virtual processor).

StarLisp consisted of standard operations on PVARS, like vector addition and multiplication, along with communication primitives that essentially reordered the elements of a PVAR using the CM's communication hardware to optimally route the data.

• Concurrent programming languages
• Dynamically typed programming languages
• Functional languages
• Lisp programming language family
• Common Lisp (programming language) software
• Multi-paradigm programming languages

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