alt Hacker NewsHow come it is named like that? It's a product of some old school consortium?
I know that ford,gm etc also made some R&D into software
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p_l • today at 9:43 PM
In addition to the official reference to CMU, there is a second origin for the name.
SBCL - Sanely Bootstrappable Common Lisp
SBCL redid the logic heavily into being able to host the core SBCL compiler parts in any mostly-complete (does not have to be complete!) ANSI CL implementation, then uses that to compile the complete form.
Meaning you can grab SBCL source tarball, plus one of GNU clisp, ECL, Clozure CL, even GNU Common Lisp at one point, or any of the commercial implementations, including of course CMUCL, and C compiler (for the thin runtime support) and build a complete and unproblematic SBCL release with few commands
From the About page:
>SBCL derives most of its code from CMU CL, created at Carnegie Mellon University. Radical changes have been made to some parts of the system (particularly bootstrapping) but many fundamentals (like the mapping of Lisp abstractions onto the underlying hardware, the basic architecture of the compiler, and much of the runtime support code) are only slightly changed. Enough changes have been made to the interface and architecture that calling the new system CMU Common Lisp would cause confusion - the world does not need multiple incompatible systems named CMU CL. But it's appropriate to acknowledge the descent from the CMU hackers (and post-CMU CMU CL hackers) who did most of the heavy lifting to make the system work. So the system is named Steel Bank after the industries where Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, respectively, made the big bucks.