[Openmcl-devel] Lisp on the iPhone

[Andrew Shalit]

On Jun 12, 2008, at 11:00 AM, Rainer Joswig wrote:

>
> Am 12.06.2008 um 16:49 schrieb Yakov ZAYTSEV:
>
>> Squeak came out of Apple labs IIRC.. It isn't suprising that it was  
>> easy for them to arrange Squeak VM on iPhone ;) IMHO
>
> CL -> CCL -> MACL -> MCL -> OpenMCL -> CCL came also from Apple's  
> Research Lab (a bit):
> MCL (Macintosh Common Lisp) was owned by Apple for a few years, it  
> was an official Apple product and
> several people now working with Clozure CL were working for Apple.  
> Apple bought the original
> developers of Coral Lisp and then they enhanced it while they were  
> working at Apple.
> So, I guess there is still some connection...

With the exception of one compiler hacker who had moved to Cupertino,  
all of the MCL/Lisp/Dylan people left Apple when the Dylan project was  
shut down.  At that point MCL had already been transferred to  
Digitool.  There may well be some interest in Lisp inside the company,  
but to the extent there is it is not connected to what we (MCL folks)  
did when we were there.

As for the restrictions on developers: It's true those would seem to  
disallow Lisp, smalltalk, a JVM, etc.  This may be a firm long-term  
policy, or it might just be an interim artifact of Apple figuring out  
their security measures.  All iPhone applications need to be signed,  
and signatures are generated by Apple for approved developers.  I'm  
not sure how that could work in the face of interpreters or compilers  
residing on the iPhone.  But maybe they'll figure out a way to let it  
happen for select tools.