Macintosh Common Lisp is an implementation and IDE

Integrated development environment

An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...

 for the Common Lisp

Common Lisp

Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...

 programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

. Various versions of MCL run under Mac OS (m68k and PPC) and Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

.

Versions of MCL up to and including 5.1 are proprietary. Version 5.2 has been open sourced.

In 2009 a new different version of MCL has been open sourced: RMCL. RMCL is based on MCL 5.1 and does run under Rosetta on Intel-based Macs.

Features of MCL

MCL was famous for its integration with the Macintosh toolbox (later: Apple Carbon

Carbon (API)

Carbon is one of Apple Inc.'s procedural application programming interfaces for the Macintosh operating system. It provides C programming language access to Macintosh system services...

), which allowed direct access to most of the Mac OS functionality directly from Lisp. This was achieved with a low-level interface that allowed direct manipulation of native Mac OS data structures from Lisp, together with a high-level interface that was more convenient to use.

In a 2001 article in Dr. Dobbs Journal, Peter Norvig

Peter Norvig

Peter Norvig is an American computer scientist. He is currently the Director of Research at Google Inc.-Educational Background:...

 wrote that "MCL is my favorite IDE on the Macintosh platform for any language and is a serious rival to those on other platforms".

History of MCL

Development on MCL began in 1984.

Over its history, MCL has been known under different names:

Running on 68k-based Apple Macintosh Computers:

• 1987, Coral Common Lisp
• 1987, Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp
• 1988, Apple Macintosh Common Lisp

Running on PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh Computers:

• 1994, Digitool Macintosh Common Lisp

It has also spawned at least one separately maintained fork:

• 1998, Clozure CL
  Clozure CL
  Clozure CL is a Common Lisp implementation. It implements the full ANSI Common Lisp standard with several extensions...
  
   (CCL), known previously as OpenMCL
• In 2007 MCL 5.2 was open sourced.
• In 2009 RMCL (MCL running under Rosetta) was published as open source.
• Since 2009 an open source version of RMCL (based on MCL 5.2) is hosted at Google Code MCL. This version runs under Rosetta (Apple's PPC to Intel code translator that is an optional install under Mac OS X 10.6).

External links

• Homepage for the commercial version (now legacy)
• [ftp://ftp.clozure.com/pub/MCL/ MCL 5.2] (sources and binary).
• [ftp://clozure.com/pub/rmcl.zip RMCL] (sources and binary).
• MCL 5.2 at Google Code
• Mac Common Lisp at NIST