| Paradigms | Multi-paradigm: functional, imperative, concurrent, meta |
|---|---|
| Family | Lisp |
| Designed by | Robert H. Halstead Jr. |
| Developer | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT |
| First appeared | 1980 |
| Typing discipline | Dynamic, latent, strong |
| Scope | Lexical |
| Implementation language | Interlisp |
| Platform | Concert multiprocessor |
| License | Proprietary |
| Influenced by | |
| Lisp, Scheme | |
| Influenced | |
| Gambit, Interlisp-VAX | |
MultiLisp is a functional programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp, and of its dialect Scheme, extended with constructs for parallel computing execution and shared memory. These extensions involve side effects, rendering MultiLisp nondeterministic. Along with its parallel-programming extensions, MultiLisp also had some unusual garbage collection and task scheduling algorithms. Like Scheme, MultiLisp was optimized for symbolic computing. Unlike some parallel programming languages, MultiLisp incorporated constructs for causing side effects and for explicitly introducing parallelism.
It was designed by Robert H. Halstead Jr., in the early 1980s for use on the 32-processor Concert multiprocessor then being developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and implemented in Interlisp. It influenced the development of the Scheme dialects Gambit,[1] and Interlisp-VAX.