Franz Lisp

Franz Lisp

4.3 BSD from the University of Wisconsin, displaying a Franz Lisp man page
Paradigms	Multi-paradigm: functional, procedural, reflective, meta
Family	Lisp
Designed by	Richard Fateman, John Foderaro, Kevin Layer, Keith Sklower
Developer	University of California, Berkeley
First appeared	1980; 44 years ago (1980)
Final release	Final / 1988; 36 years ago (1988)
Typing discipline	Dynamic, strong
Scope	Static, lexical
Implementation language	C, Franz Lisp
Platform	VAX, 68000
OS	VMS, Unix, Unix-like, Eunice, SunOS
License	Proprietary, freeware
Influenced by
Lisp, Maclisp, Common Lisp
Influenced
Allegro Common Lisp

In computer programming, Franz Lisp is a discontinued Lisp programming language system written at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, UCB) by Professor Richard Fateman and several students, based largely on Maclisp and distributed with the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX minicomputer.^[1] Piggybacking on the popularity of the BSD package, Franz Lisp was probably the most widely distributed and used Lisp system of the 1970s and 1980s.^[2]

The name is a pun on the composer and pianist Franz Liszt.

It was written specifically to be a host for running the Macsyma computer algebra system on VAX. The project began at the end of 1978, soon after UC Berkeley took delivery of their first VAX 11/780 (named Ernie CoVax, after Ernie Kovacs, the first of many systems with pun names at UCB). Franz Lisp was available free of charge to educational sites, and was also distributed on Eunice, a Berkeley Unix emulator that ran on VAX VMS.