[Info-vax] VAX Common Lisp

[Robert Carleton]

On Wednesday, October 26, 2022 at 12:21:16 PM UTC-5, Robert Carleton wrote:
> On Wednesday, October 26, 2022 at 8:58:31 AM UTC-5, Arne Vajhøj wrote: 
> > On 10/26/2022 6:44 AM, Robert Carleton wrote: 
> > > So, who wound up with the intellectual property/source for VAX Common Lisp? Is it LispWorks Ltd? 
> > I don't know Lisp so this may be a stupid question, but are there 
> > any reason to believe DEC did not create VAX Lisp from scratch based 
> > on language definition? 
> > 
> > If they did and they did not sell it off like Rdb and a few other 
> > things, then IPR must have gone DEC->CPQ->HP->HPE and VSI 
> > should have a license to use the source (the word here is 
> > that VSI got license to everything VMS from HPE). 
> > 
> > Which will not help much as HPE has no interest in VMS any 
> > longer and VSI will not see a business case for 
> > migrating Lisp to Alpha/Itanium/x86-64. 
> > 
> > Arne
> My understanding is that VAX Common Lisp was created from Spice Lisp. Apparently, some of the DEC Lisp team came from CMU. I asked the LispWorks team if they have any stake in VAX Common Lisp. We'll see what they say. 
> 
> Cheers, 
> 
> --Bruce

According to a LispWorks representative, VAX Common Lisp wasn't passed down from Lucid. Apparently it's development stopped with Lucid. Well, if anyone knows where the source code landed, maybe it could be released under a public license and a cross-compilation could be attempted.