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It isn't. Newlisp shares that not much with McCarthy's Lisp. newlisp does not even have linked lists, it has a different evaluation model, ..., no GC.

Languages like Standard Lisp, Franz Lisp, ISLisp, Eulisp, Emacs Lisp, Visual Lisp are in the Lisp tradition and share a core language.

newlisp is a different language. Call it ParenthesesScript, ContextScript or something like that.



> does not even have linked lists

Conses are different in newlisp, but it certainly does have linked lists:

> In newLISP, there are no dotted pairs. Instead, each newLISP cell contains one object and a pointer to another object if the cell is part of a list.

> different evaluation model

That one is true, yes.

> no GC

No, but it implements McCarthy's original intent through the ORO scheme. NewLisp's ORO thing is very annoying if you ask me, but it does its job; it achieves the same thing that McCarthy mentioned in his paper: "This process [...] is more convenient for the programmer than a system in which he has to keep track of and erase unwanted lists. Its efficiency depends upon not coming close to exhausting the available memory with accessible lists etc."

Let's not delude ourselves here. NewLisp is not necessarily one of the "better" Lisp implementations, but it has S-expressions, Scheme-like function application and automatic memory management. I think that's reason enough to call it SomethingLisp.


> Conses are different in newlisp, but it certainly does have linked lists

These are different. newlisp seems to have a list cell, which then points to linked content cells.

A mechanism which is different from any other Lisp dialect.


> newlisp does not even have linked lists

No, it does. Linked list are the fundamental data structure; the difference with respect to linked list from other lisps is, in fact, that in newLisp linked lists are fundamental, not just one application of cons cells, so you can't have a cons cell where cdr is not a proper list.




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