Re: Naive DEFSYSTEM replacement

This message is not about pathnames at all.
Just can't help myself from geezing out about
old DEC operating systems like VMS.
And it has LWW in it :)

So, the last VMS system I used in production with Lisp was
on an Alpha, for a long-distance/info-services provider (an IXC).
This was a billing system that I wrote in Lispworks/Windows
doing SQL (through an ODBC adapter) to an RMS database.
This was new code in late 1999.

No VMS pathnames involved, though.
And Lisp was hosted remotely on Windows.
But VMS was going strong, still, in Y2K and beyond.

The last DEC computer I got paid to program was
right after that, in 2001. I was enhancing a large
application (CAD system) written in assembly code
on TOPS-20. The codebase originated sometime
before 1976, and in 2000 was being used to design
an advanced network router (controlled by a new
PDP-10, clone also created by the company).
No Lisp in that story -- but I thought I would throw
a historical footnote about PDP-10s in there while
we're at it. The PDP-10 of course having been a
major traditional Lisp platform prior to Common Lisp.
The PDP-10 ISA is organized around memory words
that represent linked list pointers (ie. CON S cells).
All the main instructions operate on LH/RH parts of a word.
For example CAR is exactly the instruction "HLRZ"
(move the LH side to the RH side, where it can be
treated as a pointer or value or subroutine address).

Howard Canon (Flavors, Symbolics, etc.) had an old
car that he drove around with the license plate HLRZ.

So those are some old-OS-old-code real life examples.
My off-topic tangential "old DEC operating systems
in production into the 21st Century" stories.
And while I didn't do it, I have no doubt that there were
Common Lisp programs running on (or doing remote file access,
at least) to VMS servers, going forward from Y2K. and possibly
even running somewhere today.

(There are also definitely MACLISP programs running
on PDP-10s or emulators running today, too.
But that's not CL., and there you're talking historical/hobbyist
rather than real live commercial production applications).

My top 3 favorite languages being Lisp, APL, and PDP-10 assembler...







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