Implementation of Portable Standard LISP for the SPARC Processor

The SPARC processor is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) microcomputer, built into the SUN4 workstations. Since RISC processors are very well-suited for LISP processing, the implementation of a dialect of LISP (Portable Standard LISP, PSL) boded well for a great speed-up in comparison with other types of microcomputers. A first approach was done at The RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, which was derived from classical processor types like MC68000 or VAX. At the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB) that initial implementation was redesigned in order to adapt PSL to the specific features of the SPARC processor. The present implementation, in some parts, is very close to the Cray PSL version also done in ZIB. Some timing informations are given in the appendix.