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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

Conceptually is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, then. The evaluation step of many (I won't say most) mainstream (not academic, and not toys people create in class) lisps will do a compilation step. It is not being interpreted any more than gcc interprets your C code. Describing it as interpretation is often wrong, and leads people to the extremely common (even here on HN) mistaken belief that Lisps are strictly interpreted and never compiled.

No reason to leave a mistake (if it was one) or a confusing statement (if it was meant in your, hah, interpretation) unaddressed.

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Between 1958 and 1960, it took them a good part of two years to get a compiler going. Little did they know that this costly delay would still have people saying that Lisp is fundamentally interpreted in 2026.

Delaying the publication of key papers in major journals until 1960, and loudly mentioning Lisp compilation as the first application of Lisp, didn't help; too late!

This is just the Wikipedia page for "interpreters" so perhaps this is fake news but

> The first interpreted high-level language was Lisp. Lisp was first implemented by Steve Russell on an IBM 704 computer. Russell had read John McCarthy's paper, "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I", and realized (to McCarthy's surprise) that the Lisp eval function could be implemented in machine code.[3] The result was a working Lisp interpreter which could be used to run Lisp programs, or more properly, "evaluate Lisp expressions".

I.e. his realization that the Lisp eval function would behave as an interpreter came at the same time as his realization that the Lisp specification of the eval function can be translated to machine language. Though he did that by hand, within a short time, they had code doing that.

> Describing it as interpretation is often wrong, and leads people to the extremely common (even here on HN) mistaken belief that Lisps are strictly interpreted and never compiled.

Well, I literally said in my post that basically all Lisp was compiled. And I was replying to a guy saying that I thought all lisp is compiled. So hopefully I'm not contributing to that misconception.

Disagree. Concepually is lifting according to its weight class here. It is entirely irrelevant whether all or most implementations compile. The germinal fact is that a "naive" interpreter implementation of LISP does not in anyway alter the semantics of the language or the code being executed.

> No reason to leave a mistake (if it was one) or a confusing statement (if it was meant in your, hah, interpretation) unaddressed.

Look buddy, I'm not here for snarking others. I am here to learn and exchange ideas.

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