T: a dialect of Lisp or LAMBDA

Abstract

The T project is an experiment in language design and implementation. Its purpose is to test the thesis developed by Steele and Sussman in their series of papers about the Scheme language: that Scheme may be used as the basis for a practical programming language of exceptional expressive power; and, that implementations of Scheme could perform better than other Lisp systems, and competitively with implementations of programming languages, such as C and Bliss, which are usually considered to be inherently more efficient than Lisp on conventional machine architectures. We are developing a portable implementation of T, currently targeted for the VAX under the Unix and VMS operating systems and for the Apollo, a MC68000-based workstation.