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Bravo! It's so rare to see someone discuss a language's closures precisely, with implementation details, and no handwaving.

A lot of the time people use the word to refer to all first-order functions, and in a wishy-washy manner that ignores the radical differences between real-world implementations.

Has anyone here installed a lisp machine emulator on a linux pc? I am wondering where to get the source from. The unlambda page, which according to google hosts the code, seems to be down.

A couple years ago when I was in school, one of my faculty members got his DEC Alpha workstation with Tru64 shipped out to him from his old job, and I tried to get the original OpenGenera port running: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3769989/Symbolics_Open_Gener... -- unfortunately it was running a too-old version of Tru64, and even though I found media for the latest version, it has hardware-tied licenses. Trying to crack it seemed like a time-pit.

Fortunately, people figured out how to get it to run on x86-64 Linux: http://www.advogato.org/person/johnw/diary/12.html

thanks! the links seems really helpful

Great post. I love reading about Lisp Machine history. I'll probably have to give in to temptation and get one some day...

Some Lisp Machine Minutia