Common EVAL

Authors:
Henry Lieberman;Christopher Fry
Affiliations:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.;Hip Software Corporation, Somerville, Mass.
Venue:
ACM SIGPLAN Lisp Pointers
Year:
1988

Citing 5
Cited 0

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Abstract

We propose that the Common Lisp standard be extended by adding to the language specification a short program, itself written in Common Lisp, to implement the EVAL function. We call this Common EVAL. The interpreters for every correct implementation of Common Lisp would be required to match the semantics of Common EVAL on valid Common Lisp expressions. It should treat other expressions as errors or as implementation dependent extensions. There are three cogent reasons for including a Common EVAL in the standard: First, since EVAL definitively specifies the behavior of Lisp programs, Common EVAL would insure uniformity of program semantics across implementations. Second, it would aid validation efforts, since the behavior of a particular implementation could always be compared to the behavior of Common EVAL. Third, it would facilitate the creation of debuggers and other program-manipulating programs that could be ported across Common Lisp implementations.