Hacking the NES With Lisp 80
Andy Hefner has a detailed blog post covering his quest to program an NES with the assistance of Common Lisp. He developed a new 6502 assembler, a mini-language for composing musical sequences, and a neat demo (rom image).
Re:a strange mix of nausea and admiration (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, when you're writing Assembly, it's still assembly. Using lisp to make macros doesn't change the langauge.
Re:a strange mix of nausea and admiration (Score:5, Informative)
The earliest lisps had assembler. It was sort of normal in a way because assembler was your language of choice for this sort of thing. C didn't exist yet, Fortran was just wrong, the other procedural languages were bulky, etc. Machines were low on memory and you often wanted to machine specific actions, you were writing your own runtime library as you went. So even as far back as Lisp 1.5 documentation discusses how to use assembler.
The earliest lisps had compilers as well which went well with assembler written functions. Your programming environment was often a stack of cards that were loaded into a machine, or a tape that was read. So stopping to edit/compile/link/load was often impractical compared to just dumping some assembler while still in the interpreter (though of course if you crashed the machine you had to hide until pitchfork wielding mob stopped looking for you).
The thing people remember most about Lisp other than parentheses are CAR and CDR functions. These are named for specific fields in a PDP 36-bit word which were accessible via machine instructions.