LISP-an Amicus Curiae Brief

This position paper is intended to supply the committee with information about LISP that can come only from someone who has used LISP extensively yet who has also had a comparable exposure to other languages competitive with LISP. In my own case I used the implementation of ALGOL due to Randell and Russel (9) from 1964 to 1969 at the Basser Computing Department of the University of Sydney, and alaso taught ALGOL for approximately fifty contact hours in several departmental "crash courses". My LISP experience extends from 1960 to now. It is hoped that the deeper understanding of LISP that this paper attempts to supply will be of value to the committee in determining the optimal number of languages to be given full support by the department.