There are few who would contest the assertion that market acceptance of artificial intelligence technology has proved a bitter disappointment to its proponents, who embarked on a proselytising mission with such high hopes in the late 1970s, and now that the whole world of machine intelligence is under a cloud, questions are being asked about the future of the Lisp language, which swept almost all before it among the US artificial intelligentsia, pace the fact that the Japanese and most Europeans tend to favour Prolog. Microbytes Daily has been addressing the issue of the future for Lisp, highlighting as a problem the fact that Lisp has a very large syntax of about 200 primitives, and is difficult to learn. And because it processes symbols and lists, Lisp requires a lot more computing horsepower than conventional languages like C or Pascal which deal with pre defined, fixed-length data structures – and with slow – and expensive – performance has come slow acceptance, culminating in a string of bankruptcies among Lisp companies, and a miserable performance over the past couple of years by what was once the most successful Lisp hardware manufacturer, Symbolics Inc. But, claims Microbytes, some Lisp developers are optimistic about the future for the language, citing the soaring improvements in processing power achieved by the rush to RISC, so that one of the key problems, that of performance, is being overcome, albeit by brute force and irgnorance. But, argue the Lisp protagonists, the future of the language lies not in pure Lisp applications, rather in linking it with existing applications written in other high level languages such as C and Pascal.
Entity Common Lisp
According to Pekka Pirinen, director of research and development for Intellitech, a Helsinki, Finland company that operates in the Lisp market, the main trend in artificial intelligence today is the integration of Lisp-based intelligent add-ons to existing database systems. Such add-ons might be a rule-based query system that acts as an interface to a large body of existing data, and the key to the concept is the ability of Lisp to link directly to other high-level languages, simply by adding a direct function call to the Lisp application, which enables the application to link and execute an existing C or Pascal program. Intellitech has a new Lisp product for 80386-based machines which it calls Entity Common Lisp. It needs 4Mb of memory and Microsoft Windows, and features links to the C and Pascal compilers from Microsoft Corp and Borland International Inc. According to Pirinen, Entity Common Lisp is the first Lisp product in the MS-DOS environment that can be linked to other high-level languages – and the company is working on a version for OS/2. The company is represented in the US by Expertelligence Inc, Goleta, California, which charges $1,000 for the MS-DOS version, and $500 for the run-time kit.
